[Gtk2hs-users] Re: [Haskell] Announce: wxHaskell 0.8

[Duncan C. <dun...@wo...>]

On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 19:41, Daan Leijen wrote:
> Announcement: wxHaskell version 0.8
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------

We've got good competition!

So let me float some ideas for improvement.

I've got gnomecanvas, gnome & gnomeui bindings brewing. I'm also
knocking up a script to check on our gtk api coverage, it needs a bit of
work to make it accurate since there are obviously lots of depreciated &
low-level functions we never want to bind, but there's plenty we should
consider like new widgets and stuff like missing setter methods (where
we've already got the getter method).

Some possible gtk2hs 1.0 goals

      * conversion to hierarchical module names
      * more complete gtk 2.4 api coverage
      * selected gnome platform module bindings
      * get documentation building
      * update web page
      * cabal build compatibility and/or RPMs for significant platforms
      * more higher level interface work

For improving the interface, I think we should look at wxHaskell's
mid-level interface. They've got this general notion of
properties/attributes and a nicer syntax for getting/setting properties.
I think it is also typesafe. This would be a good improvement I think,
it would subsume many of the
	gtk_*_(get|set)_thing
functions and also many of the
	g_object_(get|set)_property "thing" ({cast via GValue} value)
interfaces. Thus far we have not really bothered with the gtk properties
because they are accessible with existing APIs, however for convenience
it would be nice to provide them. It would provide type safety too.

Other higher level stuff like Manuel's ports system should probably be
considered too (I see it's in configure.in), maybe post 1.0 though. We
could have ports-enabled versions of many widgets. GConf would integrate
nicely with a ports system I think - connect a gconf key with a port.

Duncan