[Mono-list] Native Mono UI widgets

[Ernesto Bascon]

On 11/07/07, "Andrés G. Aragoneses [ knocte ]" <knocte at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jonathan Pobst escribió:
> > Ah, I guess it's purely philosophical then.  Basically boiling down to
> > "Do we really need *another* toolkit"?  We have to have WinForms to
> > provide compatibility with the .Net framework.  And we need GTK# to make
> > Mono a great choice for Linux (and somewhat cross-platform) apps.  (And
> > there are others like QT and wxNet and Cocoa#.)  So what would another
> > toolkit bring?
> >
> > Writing an entire toolkit is hard and expensive.  WinForms has been
> > under development for probably 4 years having up to 6 people working on
> > it full-time as well as plenty of contributors.
> >
> > I don't really know of any benefit to making another one.  WinForms is
> > already "Mono native" in that it's fully done with System.Drawing.  It
> > seems like a new one would simply take the WinForms widgets and change
> > the API simply for the sake of being different.  :)
>
> I guess he's not asking 'why not doing another toolkit using S.D.' but
> 'why not redo Gtk# using S.D.'. I guess the disadvantages of that would
> be less performance and much time needed to write it, but in the end it
> would be a managed toolkit and many problems that Gtk# has already,
> would blow, don't you think?
>

My concerns are about:

1. I know Mono intends to be a Microsoft .NET implementation on Unix,
and a library like System.Windows.Forms is totally needed;  though I
do not like the SWF APIs [ok, programming GUI applications with SWF is
easier than programming them with, by example, Java Swing; but you do
not have the MVC separation and all the elegant way of controlling
things].

2. GTK+ is a nice library and Gtk# is a good binding, but again, we
are tied to the computer infrastructure.

Having a Mono specific UI library, maybe built on top of the current
implementation of SWF but feeling free to implement new things [not
necessarily compatible with Microsoft's SWF implementation] could add
a lot of value and richness to the Mono library [theming, KDE and
Gnome interoperability, etc.]

Having a Gtk# implementation built on top of System.Drawing could also
be valuable in the same way.

Yes, I know that it is like reinvent the wheel, but also means turning
Mono in a more independent (and thus, complete) platform.

Kind regards,


Ernesto


> Regards,
>
>         Andrés  [ knocte ]
>
> --
>