OpenEuphoria

2. Re: WinMan

• Posted by "Cuny, David" <David.Cuny at DSS.CA.GOV> Apr 01, 1999
• 594 views

Ying-KitLeung wrote:

> What is WinMan?
> How can I look at it?

WinMan is one of my many failed attempts to write a GUI for DOS. It's
incomplete, but incorporates some pretty spiff ideas, many of them borrowed
from QNX's MicroGUI. It has the look and feel of KDE/Qt.

For example, clicking on a control actually passes the mouse event through
all the intermediate layers (screen -> window -> control), with each level
having the opportunity to ignore, react to, and block the event. Render is
accomplished in just the opposite manner - render events are passed up
(control -> window -> screen) through the interface, being blocked and
clipped along the way, until they reach a level where the actual rendering
is implemented. This makes rendering very efficient.

WinMan was also implemented as an object oriented program. I kept reading
how OOP was great for writing visual interfaces, and wanted to see for
myself. It's got inheritance, message passing, and a whole lot of goodies.

I ran into a major stumbling block in the design, however. Controls were
very stupid about their states, and redrew themselves entirely, instead of
only updating the portion that needed updating. And my OOP code didn't allow
me to override some class behaviors which proved too difficult to fix
without a major rewrite of the code. Still, every time I run the demo, I get
the feeling I should have kept working on it. 

You can find WinMan on the Euphoria Archives page
(http://members.aol.com/FilesEu/archive1.htm#GUI) filed under User
Interfaces as "DOS Window Manager Prototype". Rather than read through the
code (ick!), I *think* the documentation tried to hit on the interesting
details.

Many of the OOP ideas in WinMan still seem rather sound to me, and there
doesn't seem to be an unacceptable performance hit to use OOP type code.

-- David Cuny