🚀 go-pugleaf

One thing that would be useful for Linux would be a RAD (Rapid
Applications Development) tool. Many of these tools for MS Windows
allow the user to graphically paint the dialog boxes on the screen,
and there are tools for Unix that work the same way. But I don't
think this is the best way of approaching the problem.

A few years ago a book was published called "Motif Tools" (IIRC
it was published by O'Reilly). This was one of the best window-
creation tool I ever used. It described the "Xmt" library (and
came with the software on a CDROM): The way Xmt worked was 
that the programmer wrote the design of the window in an Xresource
file for the application, in a very high level format. A tool like
that takes more time to initially learn than drawing the UI straight
on the screen, but once learnt is quick to use and flexible.

Perhaps something like that could be implemented for Linux. What I'm
thinking of in particular would be a tool where the programmer writes
a file describing the UI, and then this is compiled into C++ source
containing a class which puts up that UI. The programmer would then
subclass this class to create their own class which would contain
the functionality of the window; in that way the UI and the
functionality would be isolated from each other. 

Sometimes RAD tools produce code output which the programmer is 
then expected to edit to create the functionality of the interface, 
but these are often problematic in that the tool finds it hard to 
distinguish between the code it has written and the code the programmer
has written, so if the UI is changed, the programmer's code gets
overwritten. Sometimes the tool attempts to get round this problem
in a clumsy way with comments, eg:

   //**** your code starts here ****
   ...
   //**** your code ends here ****

IMO this is, at best, ugly. The idea behind putting the UI code
and the functionality code in separate classes is to remove this
problem.


Of course, there's no reason why the tool should be restricted to only
producing C++ output; different UI-compilers could be written
which would produce output in different languages/libraries, eg:
C++/Qt, C++/GTK--, C/Motif, Java/awt, Python/tkinter, etc. Indeed,
backends could be written that target other platforms, such as
Windows and Macintosh.

Does anything like this currently exist for Linux?

-- 
@@  Phil Hunt ........................ Don't fear the penguins!  @@ 
@@  [Disclaimer: this is FREE ADVICE, and is distributed in the  @@
@@  hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; this  @@
@@  advice is not applicable if your name is Gates or Ballmer.]  @@