Hey all! The following part of Jeff's message made me do some thinking: >> You see, Loci will use XML quite extensively. The Desktop of Loci (one >>of the >> frontends) will parse and manipulate XML descriptions of GUI widgets, >> something like what libglade does. But along with standard GUI widgets, the >> Desktop will have 'vector-graphic widgets', describe via XML and also >>able to >> be manipulated. (Loci is actually quite complex and difficult to >>explain in What is the current gameplan for attempting to implement this XML -> GUI parsing? a. Use Glade for Gtk widget generation and then use some kind of converter or something to get GUIs in other languages/graphic toolkits. b. Use Entity (http://entity.netidea.com/), which was mentioned on the list earlier (and does have python bindings) and has a more general XML format then Glade XML. We would then probably have to do some helping to get support for other GUI interfaces. c. Define our own XML and write our own parsers to generate user interfaces. Since I am starting to mess around with developing widgets and everything, this is a pretty interesting subject to me, as I rather be making them in XML. I would be really interested to hear everyone's ideas/suggestions about this subject! I also have another random idea that might be possible _instead_ of using an XML-> gui converter. We could only have two GUI interfaces--the current Gtk/Gnome one, and a Java one. If we used JPython to script the java interfaces, we could make use of these GUI interfaces. I can think of some advantages to this approach: 1. We could re-use a lot of the python/Gtk code, and would only have to re-implement the interfaces. 2. We could gain Java's portability, which would allow Loci to run just about everywhere (including web browsers). Of course, there are a number of disadvantages as well: 1. The method of Loci-sharing via interchange of XML would probably have to re-thought (although I think it would still be possible--the XML descriptions would probably be smaller/different). 2. Things we use would have to be written in either Java or python, so we'd lose a lot of useful c libraries. I was just thinking about this, so I thought I would throw it up for everyone's consideration. Thanks for listening! Brad