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[uberska]

Two weekends ago I went to visit my friend Craig in Biddeford, Maine. I picked up Mike Haight on the way. We had a great time at the beach. Maine water is surprisingly cold! Most of the time we weren't at the beach we were playing poker. I have never really played poker before, but it's a lot of fun. There was a ton of traffic (even at 7PM on

Comments

[hellofromdj]

I think you are the first person I have ever heard who actually likes Swing. Though I can't say I have worked with C#'s GUI toolkit. Either way, I hate Swing, which is why for my SE project I programmed the initial GUI objects from scratch...even the little blinking cursor in textbox. When it comes to creating GUI's, I personally think VB 5+6 did it best. Click...click...drag...done!

[uberska]

I'm probably the first person you've ever heard that likes Swing because it's easy for us to complain about the bad things, but the good things hardly get mentioned. Swing has some amazing things going for it in my opinion. Layout Managers are essential to a GUI toolkit. Non-resizeable GUI components are unacceptable. Putting that burden on the programmer beyond setting up the layout is also unacceptable. Swing has a lot of powerful components built in. If it doesn't have something you need, it's quite easy to extend to add any additional functionality. Also, the free Java forums provide free and comprehensive help for any GUI related problems. The forums aren't actually limited to just Swing

[juozasg]

Swing is heaven. MFC is hell. The rest are in between. This is ny no means an an absolute scale. I can't dispose of the feeling that there is something really, really wrong with humanity's approach to GUI programming. But I have no better ideas.

[uberska]

Perhaps what you are picking up on is the duplication of data. Unfortunately, this is necessary. Picture a friendly text box. If the user enters "A#AS" for a zip code, you don't want that information in your variable. Now, two things store the same data most of the time: your state variable and the corresponding gui component. Also, to separate GUI from logic, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops (static methods, observer models, or passing tons of references around). All of these are rather clunky.

At work the other day, we watched a video about "immediate mode guis" which are guis that are made similarly to an immediate mode rendering pipeline. I can't find a link on Google to any page describing it. Most of the links refer to a different gui paradigm with the same name. Needless to say, it seemed pretty ridiculous. There was a lot of hand waving.

I'd be interested if you have any thoughts on a better approach to GUI programming. You said you don't, but if anything comes to you, let me know.

[sabado]

woohoo howl at the moon ; )