On 2012-12-23 22:03, Chris wrote:
There exist some GUI Toolkits for D, however, they are more or less all
based on bindings to native toolkits.
Is anyone working on or are there plans to develop a pure Swing-like GUI
Framework for D? While bindings have the advantage of using native
widgets, they tend to lack behind as native widgets toolkits evolve and
improve from version to version. Also, the full use of native features
is not always easily accomplished (cf. SWT/JFace). A self-contained
framework (like Swing) that could be extended as needed by a small set
of native bindings - to implement os specific tasks - might be worth
looking into.
Am one of those who prefer to use native widgets compared to something
like GTK. But as you say they don't all provide all features. I think a
good idea is the use a cross-platform GUI library for the common widgets
that exists on all platforms, i.e. buttons and windows. There's not
reason to use the native API for those. Then extend that with platform
specif code using the native API, i.e. unified tool bar, sheets and so
on, that is found on Mac OS X.
D would have the benefit of hindsight in avoiding mistakes made in other
GUI toolkits (such as Swing and SWT/JFace), and while this may sound
like reinventing the wheel, catering for cross-platform bindings
(Windows, Linux and OS X) is an endless race, and might not be real
cross-platform after all, because either a whole platform is not (yet)
catered for (cf. DWT), or some features are not yet implemented for one
platform or another.
I agree that it would be really nice to have a cross-platform GUI
framework written explicitly for D. But as you say that would be an
enormous task to do.
I'm working on the Mac OS X port of DWT. It all compiles but a lot is
not working. Some snippets are working:
https://github.com/d-widget-toolkit/dwt-mac
Any help is appreciated.
Programmers have to make practical decisions and from my own experience
I know that nothing is worse than betting on the wrong horse, and at
present I could not decide on a GUI toolkit for D.
Your comments and advice are more than welcome.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
