On Wednesday, 20 February 2013 at 21:03:31 UTC, Jacob Carlborg
wrote:
On 2013-02-20 21:01, Adam Wilson wrote:
More to the point, very few approach it with the idea of
splitting the
View (style) from the Model(implementation). When you do that,
you can
do some very cool things with a reasonable amount of work.
Cocoa does that on Mac OS X. SWT does that together with JFace.
I studied these days some existing declarative alternatives to
xaml (qml and yaml) and unfortunatelly they are far far far away
from WPF. There is some thin support for data binding, but there
is nothing like animations, triggers, templates, behaviours,
typography, effects, validation and so on.
If someone will dare sometime to such endeavor to port something
like WPF for D, I reitrate my opinion that D will need some kind
of runtime reflection, at least for design time support. Parsing
tens of thousands of lines of code (if available) just to query
the properties available for an object is not such a good idea.
Another approach found in the native world is the one used by
Delphi/FreePascal, but this will need to rethink the lib
structure and will introduce a new language protection attribute.
Delphi/Lazarus uses a new level of protection ("published") to
decorate a object property available at runtime. Published
properties are stored in the lib file (dcu file in Pascal) with
type information. These kind of properties allow access to object
internal structure for IDE form designers. Of course, a simple
compiler switch will strip runtime information from the release
version of the target executable.
