Re: [wxhaskell-devel] XRC and type safety

[Mads L. <mad...@ya...>]

Hi Gour

On Wed, 2010-01-27 at 19:42 +0100, Gour wrote:
> On Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:11:19 +0100
> >>>>>> "Mads" == Mads Lindstrøm wrote:
> 
> Hi Mads,
> 
> Mads> It was great to see XRC being added to wxHaskell. Nonetheless, it
> Mads> seems to have less type safety than the "traditional" way of
> Mads> creating widgets. 
> 
> XRC seems to becoming topic in wxhaskell again...
> 
> Mads> There seems to be two static guaranties we are
> Mads> now missing:
> Mads> 
> Mads> 1) The naming of widgets is by strings which can be misspelled.
> Mads> 
> Mads> 2) One can accidentally use a wrong *res function for accessing
> Mads> the widget. E.g. using radioBoxRes for a button.
> 
> Does gtk2hs using Glade suffer from the same problem?

I do not know much about gtk2hs, but from this
http://www.haskell.org/gtk2hs/docs/tutorial/glade/ it seems like the
surfer from the same two problems.

> 
> Mads> Fortunately, it could easily be remedied by parsing the xrc.xml
> Mads> file and generating the necessary functions.
> 
> That would be great, even more to get haskell code generation from XRC
> support in some GUI builder.
> 
> Mads> Would people think this is a good idea? Would you use it?
> 
> I'd definitely using it considering it's advantage to use GUI builder
> to generate XRC.
> 
> Mads> If people are interested, I would gladly volunteer to turn the
> Mads> proof of concept into "real" code.
> 
> Has anything happened in regard so far (I excuse myself for
> questioning being quite new with wxhaskell.)?

Nothing has happened so far, but  I will take the prototype further. I
do not expect it to be much work, so hopefully something will be ready
soon. I have no plans to build a non-toy XRC based GUI myself, so an
early early adapter, could be very helpful in keeping this little
project focused. You might be interested in being an early adapter?

> 
> 
> Sincerely,
> Gour

/Mads