From octave-graphics-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Fri Mar 12 00:23:08 1999 Subject: Re: Comments on GUI and plotting library From: "John W. Eaton" To: octave-graphics at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 00:20:56 -0600 (CST) On 11-Mar-1999, Jonathan King wrote: | The disadvantages are that it isn't | GPL, and it has some dorky features (but what doesn't?). No kidding. I should know better by now, but still every time I see some new GUI toolkit, I think `maybe this is the one' only to discover after looking at it for a while that there are at least a few things about it that I consider really ugly or that could turn out to be definite problems in the future. That is why I am now absolutely sure that it would be a big mistake to not provide our own layer between Octave and any toolkit, even something like wxWindows that claims to be trying to provide the generic layer. Sorry if this is already obvious to everyone, but what I think we have to do to start is define our own set of basic GUI functions that can be supported by most toolkits, and then implement them using some toolkit. If the interface is designed correctly, it should only require defining a new concrete C++ class to act as the interface glue to a new toolkit. To add new GUI functions, we add new features toh the base class and then implment the actual stuff in terms of the supported toolkits in the concrete classes. So, what (small) set of GUI objects do we need to start with, and what should the interface look like so that the objects we create will work well together? jwe