[MonoDevelop] Gtk# GUI Designer?

[Martin Probst]

Am So, den 11.07.2004 schrieb Payton Byrd um 14:21:
> I think that using namespaces fixes the problems described.  You have a
> basic namespace for "standard" widgets such as buttons and labels, and
> then each targeted widget would reside in a targeted namespace.

Yes that would fix it. But without being to negative I think this would
result in a very limited set of widgets (see xhtml+css). This would
massively limit the possibilities of the developer.

> In the case of Microsoft, they probably won't
> support GTK widgets directly, but that doesn't mean you cannot create a
> user control to implement a GTK widget and then map that widget's
> namespace node to your user control when the XML is parsed to the native
> language.

Would you parse the XML and translate it before shipment or on the
client? In the first case this could be possible, but in the latter it
would result in the complexity problems I described below.

These mappings would have to be done for a lot of widgets (nearly
everything exceeding basic labels etc.) and doing that might be non
trivial and error prone. Just imagine the different programming concepts
involved with treeviews/listviews in different toolkits like GTK+, MS
Forms, Swing and Qt. These are rather basic widgets, you would need to
do this for the concept to be useful.

You would have to find some kind of a meta-model programming style to
cover rather primitive listviews like those in Qt and rather
sophisticated like in Swing.

In my experience GUI toolkits don't just differ in the way they name
things but also in basic concepts.

mfg
Martin