(proposal for) source code generator

["Amadeus W.M." <amadeus84 verizon net>]

I'm using gtkmm again after a break of about 1 1/2 years and I see some 
things have changed. For one, I was building the gui with glade
(glade-2 to be precise), and then I would use glade-- to generate the 
source code. I know, libglademm was the preferred method, but I preferred 
glade-- because the code generated by glade-- already contained the 
appropriate signal_connect() instructions. With libglademm I had to write 
them myself. Anyway...

Now glade-- seems defunct, and despite my efforts to resuscitate it, I 
can't repair it. So I have to byte the bullet and migrate to libglademm. I 
tried some basic examples and it's not too bad, but it just crossed my 
mind that one could write a code generator that uses libglademm. 

To exemplify, suppose I have a trivial application with a top level window 
with just a button in it that outputs "OK" to stdout when clicked. That's 
the whole application. The gui part of the code for this would be as 
follows:


class MainWindowGUI : public sigc::trackable
{

protected:

    Glib::RefPtr<Gnome::Glade::Xml> refXml;
    Gtk::Window * mainWindow;
    Gtk::Button * okButton;


    virtual bool on_mainWindow_key_press_event(GdkEventKey *ev) = 0;
    virtual void on_okButton_clicked() = 0;



public:

    MainWindowGUI(Glib::RefPtr<Gnome::Glade::Xml> refXml)
	: mainWindow(0), okButton(0) {
	
	// Get the main window.
	refXml->get_widget("mainWindow", mainWindow);
	if (!mainWindow)
	    throw std::runtime_error("Couldn't find okButton in 
ok2.glade");

	// Get the button.
	refXml->get_widget("okButton", okButton);
	if (!okButton)
	    throw std::runtime_error("Couldn't find okButton in 
ok2.glade");

	// Connect to signals.
	mainWindow->signal_key_press_event().connect(sigc::mem_fun(*this, 
&MainWindowGUI::on_mainWindow_key_press_event),false);
	okButton->signal_clicked().connect(sigc::mem_fun(*this, 
&MainWindowGUI::on_okButton_clicked));

    }
    

    Gtk::Window & getWindow() { return *mainWindow; }


};


In general, the MainWindowGUI class would contain a pointer to each widget 
found in the .glade file and also pure virtual callbacks, again as 
specified in the .glade file. The constructor would contain the 
appropriate signal_connect() calls. 

I don't know enough xml/xslt but I suspect this could be done by creating 
an intelligent xslt file, say application.xsl, then generate the code with 
an off-the-shelf xslt processor like so:

xsltproc application.xsl application.glade > MainWindowGUI.hh

Thus, one would not have to write massive amounts of code to parse the 
xml .glade file and generate the C++ code from it. All that would need to 
be written (not by me though) would be a one-time xslt file (transform).


Would this be feasible? Any xml experts willing to try this?