GUI Toolkit API?

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Vadim Zeitlin <zeitlin at seth.lpthe.jussieu.fr> wrote:

>  But, to return to the main subject: I don't belive that you can do it. Even
> with unlimited amount of free time (a strong assumption) it would still be
> difficult to do it without creating a 100Mb monster library collapsing under
> its own weight and complexity.

There's also the most common denominator problem. It's easy to code
something up that wraps the buttons and text fields of all toolkits,
since all toolkits have those. That's what Sun has done with AWT,
basically. However, if you want to have all the great extensions that
every toolkit provides, then you'll have to write emulation code for
the missing bits, _if_ you're set on using what's already available. 
That's the position of wxWindows. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I rather
had the impression that all the really interesting, high-level widgets
wxWindows offers are custom-coded for wxWindows, like the html-widget.

Or, and that's the approach Qt takes, and tk took before it started
using native widgets (if I remember correctly), you can write a
portable toolkit  - portable in that it compiles on every platform that
has primitives for drawLine and putPixel, and make it emulate the
platform look and feel. Swing takes this route, too. It's quite doable,
and can lead to good results (Qt looks and feels just native), or to
bad results (Swing), but it can work. See also Trolltech's paper on the
subject: ftp://ftp.trolltech.com/qt/pdf/whitepaper.pdf. 

Covering all existing API's with a new API is basically a pipe-dream,
that doesn't solve any problem. It merely adds surfeit to an already
existing embarrasment of choice, and will never make the lower API
disappear... 

Trying to get everyone to use the same uber-API is a political endeavor,
not a technical. People chose one API over another because they like the
style of coding better, or because of its cross-platform availability, not
because it keeps users of all other API's contented. Personally, I like
choice - I've carefully evaluated all gui toolkits before choosing one:
PyQt, PythonQt, tkInter, wxWindows, wxGTK, Amulet, Foxpy, pyFLTK... Not
the MFC bindings of Python, though - I didn't need to, having been a
Windows programmer in a prior life ;-).

-- 

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.valdyas.org | Christos Voskrese!