Re: Design question for a cross platform GUI (FLTK)
- Posted by David Cuny <dcuny at LANSET.COM> Oct 15, 2001
- 566 views
Ray Smith wrote: > I have to make a decision as to how I will > expose the classes and methods of FLTK. I chose to make Win32Lib look a lot like Visual Basic because I think it VB does a good job of hiding complexity from the end user. Other than having to know about how to repaint a window, you don't need a lot of information about the underlying toolkit. The problem with this approach is that the wrappers are a bit more complex. You end up having to do a bit of work behind the scenes to get things to work, and this gets in the way of the 'power user'. A good example of this is the font system - it's convenient for the end user, but not especially efficient. If you're trying to emulate a rich text display that needs to display a lot of fonts in a lot of styles, it's much more efficient to write your own wrappers. Other factors include the size of the toolkit, and how often it changes. If you are autogenerating your wrappers with something like SWIG, it's much simpler if you use the 'native' approach. You just create a wrapper generator that, given a file of C++ function prototypes, spits out C wrappers. Much less "hands on', an you can concentrate on other things. If the toolkit is large, or has a nice API, this is the way to go. -- David Cuny