[MonoDevelop] Gtk# GUI Designer?

[Kris Luyten]

Hi,

On Thu, 08 Jul 2004 16:06:17 -0300, Marcos Carneiro da Rocha
<mcrocha@terra.com.br> wrote:
> I think it could be used to generate pure code with vb, c# and asp.net.
> With this approach you can design a form just once and choose the
> language to generate it after that.
> The form specification could be a generic xml file.
> It could be a generic specification that allow me to choose gtk#,
> winforms, web forms, etc .....

Although I am not a very regular Glade or Monodevelop user, I am very
much in favor for this kind of idea. It would be a very powerful
approach to have a generic GUI builder, that uses some kind of XML to
save the GUI design without restricting it to a particular widget set.
One of the problems is how to make sure the widgets used in the
designer will be available in the target widget set afterwards.

Imagine you could do something similar like when using Glade and
libglade, but you could also choose the widget set that will be used
dynamically like this:

Application.Init();
//"MyUIDescription.xml" created with a GUIBuilder
UimlDocument uimlDoc = new UimlDocument ("MyUIDescription.xml");
uimlDoc.Autoconnect (this);
IRenderer renderer = BackendFactory.CreateRenderer("gtk-sharp"); 
//or "SWF", or "wx.net",...
renderer.Render(uimlDoc);


There are some approaches that try to implement this kind of
widget-set independent XML-language to describe the user interface;
one of them is UIML (http://www.uiml.org,
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=uiml) and
another one is usixml (http://http://www.usixml.org/). The above code
example is already partially reality in our freely available UIML
renderer, cfr.: https://sourceforge.net/projects/uimldotnet/ or
http://research.edm.luc.ac.be/kris/projects/uiml.net/.

Regards,
Kris
--
http://research.edm.luc.ac.be/kris