Am Sun, 9 Sep 2007 23:49:01 -0400 schrieb Youness Alaoui: > > I've proposed that common parts should be made as another library, > > so more things are shared... as they already share evas (base > > graphics) and edje (theme), I think that layout could be split in a > > libelayout, doing hbox, vbox and tabular, with all required packing > > options (expand, fill, ...), we could use this in other apps, like > > "rage". But both teams said they're completely different in this > > area and would need a deep refactor to adapt to this... I proposed > > to do that myself, but no time yet :-P > > Anyway, sharing these basic components could (in theory!) lead to > > these toolkits unifying someday, but someone need to do the work > > others don't want to do (like this libelayout). > > > > Well, I agree on what you're saying, and I've thought about it too, > but slightly different. I was thinking that E, just like KDE and > Gnome, should have its own toolkit, and 'etk' answers that by being > 'enlightenment toolkit' (I'm talking here about the key word > "toolkit"). So if we compare the words "Enlightenment Toolkit" then > ETK is a toolkit... while EWL, "Enlightenement Widget Library" is > more of a library providing widgets (which is also known as a > 'toolkit' but it doesn't have the 'toolkit' keyword in it). So I > thought that maybe ETK should provide a simple to use API, wrapping > EWL, where EWL would be as customizable as possible. If I understood > correctly, the main difference in ETK and EWL is that they have > different views on how the API should be and the widgets should look, > so if ETK uses EWL in the background, provides the API it wants, and > customizes the EWL widgets to look the way ETK developers want it to > look, then the choice would be easier : use ETK if you want a high > level toolkit, or use EWL if you want a set of widgets that you want > to use and customize the way you want them to be. ETK being a simple > wrapper to EWL would avoid code duplication, would centralize the > efforts, and would help the users choose their API more easily.. > instead of saying : "you have two toolkits, choose one", one could > say "EWL provides you with widgets, and ETK wraps it into a higher > level API". That would be awesome, but I'm guessing this idea will > get some people angry... not sure what others think though...?
You may search in the archive some month ago. I had the same question and there were the same answers. But my problem was more the theme double work than the API. Currently you need to do many theme work if you like to have a desktop in one style (E, EWL, ETK, and not counting all that Esmart_Container and custom Evas_Smart using apllications). All the ease of theme creating with Edje is useless if you need to theme most widgets at least three times. I understand that EWL or ETK developers spend to much work in _their_ toolkit to throw part of it away. If I were an ETK developer I would be pissed off by ideas like: "ETK should be an EWL wrapper and not more". But I think it should be possible to unify some things between at least ETK and EWL (perhaps E itself). I tried both tester applications, looked at the API, looked into the source and wrapped some (small) parts of it in eflpp (C++ wrapper) (not yet commited). I understand the different thinking of ETK and EWL developers, but from the end users (not application developers) point of view ETK and EWL are pretty the same. The difference between GTK and QT is much much bigger. But theme creators are nerved because they need to create many themes. And users are nerved because widgets look perhaps only 95% the same on their desktop. Application developers have the choose about the toolkit to use, but application users don't have this choose! Currently developers, users and theme creators are most the same people. But this will hopefully change in future. Most themes will always be uncomplete because there's only ETK or EWL included (what the author likes more). So users need to become theme creators to have a consistent looking desktop. You put more work into themes with the current way. How mamy _complete_ themes with consistency about all apps do you know? I know only the default theme. Perhaps there's another theme that I don't know. So if ETK, EWL (and perhaps E) would use a unified theme for about 80% of the widgets, this would be marvelously. I could write some words about the differences I found between ETK and EWL. But I don't like to do that. Please concentrate on the similarities. If only EWL and ETK developers would be open to that idea... regards Andreas ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
