On Friday, 6 March 2015 at 06:02:17 UTC, Taylor Hillegeist wrote:
So I have played with a few GUI libraries with bindings
available through D. Personally I find that it seems like there
is alot of effort being put forth on GUI projects.
It is my experience that most project's fail or die, not
because of lack of effort but lack of specification, many
people start projects thinking, can i make it do this? how
about this? and a project is born! but soon interest is lost
and the project dies. But specification can lead to projects
that become useful earlier, more stable, and live longer
happier lives.
At this point i think the following features are the most
useful.
-Ease of setup-
dub integration is awesome, without it things are more
difficult. This has very little to do with the actual toolkit.
-Minimal dependencies-
Personally If i can statically link a toolkit to my GUI and it
has zero dependencies outside of the OS typically install. I am
very happy. really the less that can be messed with the better.
best in my opinion: DWT MiniGUI DGUI at least for windows.
-Rock Solid Stable-
So when I do the hello world application I resize the window
push the buttons and do pretty normal things. But on some
libraries I get weird stuff going on sometimes the window even
becomes invisible..... scary.
best in my opinion: GTKD TKD
-GUI EDITOR/BUILDER-
Good- You can edit a static layout
Better- you can edit a layout and re-size the window layout
responds
Best- you can edit the actual window in real time without
recompile.
Good- You have a pallet of basic widgets that you can place.
Better- You have a pallet of basic widgets + custom widgets
that you can edit.
Best- You have the above + a database were people can share
widgets :)
-Widgets-
Personally I think that all layout items like HBar should be
children of widget that way i can make more modular component,
but that's just my opinion.
-Data Binding-
Most of the time I use that data a widget represents and much
less often the events they produce.
-Ease of Use-
Your tookits should work for you... not the other way round.
-layout-
I have seen some schemes like Winforms Dock,javaFX HBar,
HTML5's float/static/absolute/realitive... Idk what seems the
most freindly... HTML5/css seems the most complex. I have a
dream H/VBar + align/distribution/wrap options.
I know some of these are RAD things. I don't have an opinion on
thread safe guis. personally I would like to see a GUI tookit
that the community said... use X it is just the way to go for
most things.
Click-able buttons A GUI toolkit should have...Click-able buttons
rocks !
More seriously, one of the problem which explains why there no
well-established GUI library around is the lack of serialization,
component streaming solution. Currently there is no standard way
in D to save and reload a class instance or a struct.
