Re: XML front-end ideas

[Andreas Pour <pour mieterra com>]

Chris Howells wrote:
> 
> David Joham wrote:
> >
> > I think the XML front end idea may have merit, but we may be getting
> > overly-complex in our solution to the problem. I'll have to think about it.
> 
> It's a nice idea certainly, although may get in the way of the actual
> goal of getting something working :) IMHO, one of the reasons
> Mozilla/Netscape 6 is taking so long is due to the complexity caused by
> the XUL interface.

True, you don't want to get too complex.  But Mozilla's XUL needs to do
a lot more.  For now all we need is the following widgets:

  * buttons
  * line-edits with RegEx
  * combo boxes
  * radio buttons
  * check boxes

I think you can configure everything just with these 5 widgets.  Later,
more objects can be added, like pop-up menus and menubars, spinboxes,
sliders, etc.
 
> > If we were to do the front end in XML, what does everyone think here about
> > having that XML be XUL (Mozilla) syntax-based? They've already done a ton of
> > work in getting an XML-GUI language and I think we may be able to leverage a
> > lot of that. In addition, that may allow for a Mozilla-based web interface
> > to be constructed easier in the future.
> 
> Another thing to bear in mind -- Mozilla is very slow at managing its
> own windows. Although we wouldn't necessarily need to use the same
> technology as Mozilla, such as tool kit would be far slower than
> something native like Qt or GTK+. I wouldn't like our setup tool to
> suffer such terrible slowness as Mozilla -- not everybody has a 1.2Gig
> Athlon with half a gig of RAM;)

Well both KDE and GNOME already have XML-based dialogs.  Most of the
work would be in implementing the original XML language and then finding
some XSLT to convert to the KDE (Qt Designer?) and GNOME (GLADE?)
formats.  Alternatively, the backend could load a module which has a
common API for generating the GUI XML which spits out the required
formats directly.

Ciao,

Dre