Re: JXTA for ObjC (was: Re: a simple program)

[Aurelien]

Le vendredi 17 août 2001, à 04:43, Richard Frith-Macdonald a écrit :

> > > The frontend has something called NSInterfaceStyle, which can be used to change the look and feel,
> > > but it requires you to actually implement the code to handle the new look and feel within the frontend
> > > library, so it's not a great mechanism.
> >
> > If this was done with QT, which also has the ability to set the interface style, this could be done once for all platforms. Pardon me if I'm wrong, this wouldn't require to write anything for the back-end; this again is already being done by QT.
>
> IU think if you used QT, you wouldn't want to use the gui library at all, or you would use NSInterfaceStyle to
> disable most of the gui library and replace it with QT objects.  Using QT objects would be a completely
> different API/programming paradigm to the OpenStep AppKit ... so I think that trying to combine the two
> would probably confuse things.

(dunno what 'IU' means - I'm french-speaking...)
I was thinking that every widget would have the ability to set it's appearance, and given this datum, would be able to draw itself accordingly (just like it's done in Swing). I don't know however what degree of granularity QT/GTK offer. Do they offer black-box objects or is it possible to ask things like: "draw a Button with label "label" at xx, yy with a width of ww and a height of hh in 'mouse down' state". GTK is, however, open-source and QT's licensing scheme provides access to the sources (it's free for use on open projects).

> > > If you really want a totally different, native, look and feel
> > > it makes more sense to omit the GNUstep gui and work with the native gui library directly.
> >
> > Yes, but that would force the developer to write a GUI/platform.
> But that's just what things like QT and GTK are supposed to be - so you wouldn't need to write a new
> gui platform.  OK, so they may be much less fully featured than the AppKit, but I think that's a
> price you probably have to pay for using them.

I'm sure that should work for statically compiled code. I'm not sure however wether it would be possible to dynamically load an NSBundle containing a QT GUI, which is what I'd like to do. I mean, the parsing of a NIB file (I know this is Mac stuff, but don't you have such mechanism too ?), and the dynamic creation of the GUI is what could definitely make GNUstep a nice platform for JXTA...

Aurélien