Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 17:52:10 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Tony Kimball <alk@Think.COM> Cc: terry@lambert.org, hackers@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: Lesstif (motif compatible) package. Message-ID: <9009.829270330@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 11 Apr 1996 16:26:31 CDT." <199604112126.QAA01909@compound.think.com>
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> xf turned out tcl7.3/tk3.6 code. I understand there are patches to > support a more modern incarnation as well, but my sense is that people > doing tcl/tk find gui-builders largely superfluous, mostly because the > geometry managers handle the layout issues that people use gui > builders to take care of. xf would need substantial enhancement in > order to parallel any of the commerical resource editors. Speak for yourself! :-) I find the lack of a truly decent GUI builder to be an impediment to writing complex Tk apps. A good builder, of which OI's ObjectBuilder was one of the finest examples I've seen, lets you do far more than simply assign the positions of things. It lets you specify the callbacks for various objects without having to know the specific callback behavior of the object in question, it lets you play with attributes such as font, color, geometry and so on very trivially, often with various very nice to use pallete editors which really cut down on the amount of manual lookup you'd need to do if you were banging the Tk code out by hand. I'm still waiting for a good one. Xf was gross, and obviously written by someone unclear on the concept of how he was supposed to be making the programmer's job easier, not harder. I've heard that SpecTCL is nicer, but I haven't gotten around to building a version of wish4.1 with the blt_table compiled in yet, so I haven't tested it. > I know you are quite fond of GUI builders. My experience is perhaps > less glowing than your own. (Mine is based on about a year spent > inside Visual C++, and a few months inside AppBuilder and TCL on the You picked some dogs - there are much better examples of what you can do with a good GUI builder than these.. :-) Jordan
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