[Cxxgui-devel] Introduction, Menus, and General Design Question

[David H. <dl...@st...>]

Hi, I just recently discovered this --mostly inactive--project and I 
thought I'd like to help breathe a little life into it. Anyway, my skill 
set isn't amazing, I know c++ ok, but the only GUI toolkit I really know 
is wxWidgets, which offends my sense of rightness with all the heavy 
macro use and such. I'm generally a quick learner, and have access to 
Windows, Mingw, and soon Linux with gtk and gcc.

Anyway, so I thought my first project would be menus, under win32 for 
now, and this is the usage I've conjured up (I've written the interface 
for it and the beginnings of the win32 impl as well):

using namespace gui;
window win("Test");
menu mn;
win.contain(mn);
mn.append( 
menu("File").append(menu("New").append(menu_item("Picture",boost::bind(on_new_picture,win)))
                                                                       
.append(menu_item("Document",boost::bind(on_new_document,win)))
                                                   )
                                     
.append(menu_item("Open...",boost::bind(on_open,win)))
                                     
.append(menu_item("Save",boost::bind(on_save,win)))
                                     .append(separator())
                                     
.append(menu_item("Close",boost::bind(on_close,win)))
                                     
.append(menu_item("Exit",boost::bind(on_exit,win)))
                  ) 
     .append( menu("Edit").append(menu_item("Cut",boost::bind(on_cut,win)))
                       .append(menu_item("Copy",boost::bind(on_copy,win)))
                       .append(menu_item("Paste",boost::bind(on_paste,win)))
                  );

I personally like the append chaining, but if it's generally not liked, 
I'll drop it. But I have an implementation question (assuming that this 
method is acceptable): Should I go ahead and add some kind of set (or 
maybe even map?) of Callback ids to signals in the window 
implementation? or maybe just a deque?

Finally, there seems to be rather schizophrenic support for std::string 
and std::wstring: it's in the win32 implementation code, but not in the 
interface code (e.g. labels on buttons). Is there a reason for this?

David Hall