[Pipet Devel] [Fwd: Sodipodi and Loci]

[Brad Chapman]

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