Re: [Dev-C++] Offtopic: Advice on GUI to learn

[Michael C U. <mu...@cb...>]

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Daniel Glenfield wrote:

> You can create a window in 5 lines, but won't that be very high level? With
> the windows API you have other things to set up. Or is there a more detailed
> version that takes 30 lines of code?

With the Windows API, you have to set up a lot of things manually that the
toolkit's class will set up for you automatically. Example, if you want to
load an image in a window and be able to scroll that image, the toolkit
has a class that will automatically set up the scrollbars for you. With
the Windows API, the scrollbars have to be manually programmed to
determine how far their range should be, how far it should move with each
click, how far it should move the image with each click, where the image
ends so that it doesn't scroll past the end, etc. You also have to
manually program the scrollbar movement and set its position. And that
won't even give you the ability to use the arrow keys, the page up/page
down keys, or the scroll wheel. If you want those, it's more manual
programming. The result is that it can literally take 80 or 90 lines of
code just to get a decent scrollbar using the Windows API. Using a high
level toolkit, you can probably do it in less than 10. In Java Swing, I
just did it with 3 lines of code. Literally, it took me 3 lines of code to
do what takes about 90 lines of code to do using the Windows API.

So yes, you are working at a much higher level with a toolkit. But
generally, that is a good thing. It lets you concentrate on what you want
to do (display a scrollable image), rather than how to do what you want to
do (implement a bunch of math formulas and such to determine how far the
image should scroll with each mouse click on a scroll arrow, how far the
scrollbar should move in response, etc.)

Mike