Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 12 Apr 1996 01:56:02 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Marc Ramirez <mrami@mrami.com>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        Tony Kimball <alk@Think.COM>, terry@lambert.org, hackers@freefall.freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Lesstif (motif compatible) package. 
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.91.960412013548.8081B-100000@boner.mrami.com>
In-Reply-To: <9009.829270330@time.cdrom.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Thu, 11 Apr 1996, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

> > 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.

Hear, hear!  I wrote a little sysconfig/netstart munger for work.  Even 
as bad as xf is comared to real GUI builders, it made a noticable dent in 
my development time. (Of course, I was learning Tcl and Tk as I went, so 
I may have a worse impression of xf than is reasonable... but I doubt it :).

I also have had the benefit of working with real GUI builders, and they
are nice.  This opinion stems from the fact that for most of the
applications we do, the code behind the interface is trivial (take the
data, format it, shove it into the database), so the interface gets lots
of development.  Using a GUI builder drastically reduces the number of
severe (and subtle) bugs in the design. 

GUI builders help interface design the same way WYSIWYG word processors
help document design: you can see mistakes as soon as you make them.  
Don't knock this asset.

Marc.

--
A tautology is a thing which is tautological.




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.3.91.960412013548.8081B-100000>