Re: [rgui-dev] RE: Backend Debouch

[Laurent Julliard]

Curt Hibbs wrote:
> I will pass this back to Laurent... and I'm happy to hear of your SWT-like
> direction (I must have missed that post, or skimmed it too rapidly).
>
> Curt
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: address@hidden
> > [mailto:address@hidden Behalf Of Tom
> > Sawyer
> > Sent: Sunday, August 25, 2002 2:51 AM
> > To: address@hidden
> > Subject: Re: [rgui-dev] RE: Backend Debouch
> >
> >
> > thanks Curt and Laurent.
> >
> > Curt, please foward to Laurent if need be.
> >
> > Laurent, please join the list. you have valuable input to offer us, even
> > if you can only spare a small bit of your time, it would be very
> > helpful.

I did! But as I said I'm currently focusing on FreeRIDE and I don't 
think I'll have much time to devote to to gutopia other than 
contributing some thoughts.

> > thank you for this info. it took me a bit of searching to find some good
> > information on SWT. let me provide some links for others:
> >
> > http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/~checkout~/platform-swt-h
> > ome/faq.html
> >
> > http://www.eclipse.org/documentation/html/plugins/org.eclipse.plat
> > form.doc.isv/topics_Reference.html
> >
> > http://www.eclipse.org/documentation/pdf/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv.pdf
> >
> > before i get further into this though let me quickly comment on the
> > other things:


About Eclipse SWT the following articles are "must-read":

 SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit - Part 1
http://eclipse.org/articles/Article-SWT-Design-1/SWT-Design-1.html

SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit - Part 2
(http://eclipse.org/articles/swt-design-2/swt-design-2.html)

Also look at http://eclipse.org/articles/index.html in the SWT section 
for other articles.

You can get the SWT CVS tree:
cvs -d:pserver:address@hidden:/home/eclipse login (no password)
cvs -d:pserver:address@hidden:/home/eclipse co org.eclipse.swt


[...lot of godd stuff deleted...]
> > > Hope I haven't been too harsh in this message. At least people know what
> > > I believe in now ;-)
> > >
> > > Clone Eclipse SWT guys! Clone it! Go, go...
> >
> > well Laurent, i hope you're not to disappointed. we won't be cloning
> > SWT. but be comforted in the fact that GUtopIa is turning out much like
> > SWT in many ways. and now that we know about SWT, we will be borrowing
> > from it, i can tell you that! SWT is a very valuable resource, and i
> > like much of what i've read about it so far. but you must understand, we
> > have good reasons not to simply clone SWT....we are creating something
> > better...something even the SWT people will envy. :-)

I understand that Gutopia goes beyond SWT and my wording was a bit 
misleading in my previous email. When I was refering to Gutopia I had 
the low level part in mid, the one which precisely map onto native GUIs. 
 I'm glad to hear that for this part SWT will be a source of 
inspiration. Actually if I were you I would really look deeply into the 
SWT architecture and adopt the same approach in terms of interfacing 
with underlying native GUIs. There is *really* no point in re-inventing 
the wheel here. So copy their approach shamelessly and spend as less 
time as possible on delivering a low-level abstraction layer.

By doing so you'll be able to focus your (presumably scarce) resources 
on the noble part of the GUtopia project which is to offer new 
ideas/concepts in the way one can control and program a UI.

> > thanks so much for you input. your words are a great asset --SWT will be
> > very useful to our work.

Well at least that's something :-) We'll see if I'll be of any further 
help in the future.

Laurent
--
Laurent JULLIARD - Xerox R&T/SSTC/XPA - Open Source team
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