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From: sheffler@colt.CS.CMU.EDU (Thomas Sheffler)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Intuition Interface Builders ?
Message-ID: <SHEFFLER.90Jun14153311@colt.CS.CMU.EDU>
Date: 14 Jun 90 19:33:11 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: Carnegie Mellon University
Lines: 32


Are there any good ways to build robust interfaces?  I've examined the
sources to many different PD programs and have seen no good examples.
By its very nature, C is not a great language for encapsulation or
data hiding, and it seems that most interfaces are built from tons of
initialized data structures with ampersands linking them together.
Then, the messages sent for each gadget are handled individually
with lots of special cases.

Some of the tools I've come across for building interfaces are:
	PowerWindows 	- I've only heard about
	Req		- a requester builder (PD)
	CanDo		- I don't know much about, but it seems that
			it's like a hypercard application builder.

I'm aware of the fact that 2.0 has the new 'gadgets.library', but I
believe that this will only shortcut the use of most common types of
gadgets, while not really opening up the possibility of easy design
and management of new gadgets.

It seems that some sort of object-oriented language for describing
gadgets and interfaces would be in order.  Such a beast would take care
of complicated update procedures (inter-related gadgets) and
allow the program writer to concentrate on issues other than
processing INTUI-MESSAGES.  This might involve a separation of the
program into two parts: the interface handler, and the guts of what
the application is doing.  Other window systems are moving in this
direction - so this is not that far-fetched.

Any ideas/comments?

	-Tom