GUI lib (you can do it Poco!!)

[mws]

Hi all,

as always discussions are running in a different way.

I would appreciate if Poco also gets an nearly 100% Poco Features using GUI,
but the possibilities to use that one are not depending on a portable and wide used
existing Framework like QT or wxWidgets or ...

Imho the main fact to choose "renewing the wheel" or "reusing existing code/libs" has to
be decided by the target environments.

There are loads of systems out there - especially embedded ones - , that have limited capabilities in RAM/ROM, ect.

A (maybe) new written GUI part, based on a good Model-View-Controller Concept, could be a good solution.

just my 2ct

Marcel

[marlowabnp]

I think with POCO we already have a great foundation to build an excellent GUI library on top of it. It's not so much a technical problem, but more a kind of manpower issue, as Alex noted. So, if we're able to find enough contributors for such a project, we can do it.

I agree that it is possible, but is it desirable? I am not so sure. There are loads of C++ GUI libraries out there and they all required and still require a tonne of work. If I had to do some graphics work on a project that was using Poco I would probably just pick one like WxWidgets and get on with it.

There are already a few GUI libraries out there worth taking inspiration from. For example, gtkmm, the C++ wrapper over GTK+ is quite decent.

I would choose from WxWidgets, FOX, FLTK, GTK or Qt.

[marlowabnp]

> I'll be mainly doing the windows code but i might be able to try the linux one eventually. So anyway just letting you know but it really depends on how well it goes of course.

Since hoping for a full-blown portable POCO GUI is not realistic given our circumstances, I have spent some time evaluating wrapping candidates and the best thing I was able to find is IUP - small, portable and modular. Wrapping it should not be a lot of work (there already exists C++ wrapper that could be POCO-ified). Would you by any chance consider directing your efforts there?
Alex

I had never heard of IUP before. Taking a quick look I see it is a wrapper. So I don't understand why one would create a wrapper for a wrapper.

I really like Poco but I do not expect Poco to provide a GUI. It provides foundation classes because they are missing from C++. GUI software is different from foundation classes. I agree that sometimes such packages need to be wrapped. For example, I can understand IUP wrapping GTK on UNIX since GTK exposes GLIB which also provides foundation classes (kind of). But I expect that a GUI program would pick whatever GUI library it liked and use Poco for the foundation classes.

I have just started using the CppUnit win runner on Windows to run the unit tests. It seems quite pleasing to me but unfortunately is coded using MFC. Is there any chance this could use an open source platform independent GUI library? Just to get the tests built? My favourite C++ GUI library is WxWidgets but this might be a bit of a heavyweight dependency for Poco. How about FLTK as an alternative, seeing as how it would only be for a GUI for the tests?

[cmello]

Would something like WPF/XAML be desirable?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/hh465328.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970268.aspx

Some key concepts:
- GUI elements are very composable; for example you can insert a button with an image inside the selected item of a combo box, all through composition; no need to customize drawing code;
- GUI element properties support default values, inheriting values from parent elements, animations and data binding (DependencyProperties);
- Appearance of widgets can be changed by changing its template;
- Very friendly to declarative gui (XAML).

I started a small gui toolkit in 2004 but it stalled. (http://lightforms.sf.net) I use a slightly improved version of it in a side project. Now instead of improving it I would prefer to start a new project borrowing ideas from WPF/XAML. But I'm not sure if these features are too much and maybe a more simple GUI would be better. What do you think?

And how about PocoWebWidgets, is this project still around?

Thank you a lot for the attention.

Best regards
Mello

[alex]

I think native GUIs are thing of the past. Server-side web-based GUIs (like WebWidget was) are not a good way to do it, either. For me, ExtJS with frameworks like three.js and d3 have been working fine.

[fbraem]

I think native GUIs are thing of the past.

I can't agree more. I've worked a lot with wxWidgets in the past, but switched to writing programs with an embedded http server. I'm a big fan of jQuery.

[Royce]

I've found I get along well with QooXDoo.