Re: [wxperl-users] porting a perl/tk application to perl/wx

[Bob H. <cat...@ya...>]

Mattia, your message is already an important step
forward. At least you acknowledge that wxPerl can be
improved from that point of view, and are open to
change/improvement. Given that time is limited for
everyone, the best approach to proceed is to post a
general "call for contributions", and leverage from
the open source community. Design ideas are valuable
as much as, if not more than, specific code, because
they can save a lot of coding.

To make the first two contributions, these are two
ideas.

The first is to talk to the developers of tkPerl and
ask them whether they want to merge with wxPerl. It
might sound odd at first, to both the tkPerl and
wxPerl communities, but read on. The first aim would
be to *design* the same API for both projects. This
API has to be consistent with PERL's philosophy,
profit from the existent API of tkPerl and allow for
wxPerl's enhanced features. When people have debated
at length on design, and everybody is happy about the
final resolution, then it is coding time for both
communities. The tkPerl community would have (a) an
improved API, (b) a means to port applications from tk
to wx with minimal effort, and (b) stay with a tk
interface if they like (wx can interface to gtk,
cocoa, etc., and thus also with tk). The wxPerl
community would finally have an API that is consistent
with PERL's philosophy.

The second idea is a tiny little one, and arises from
a simple problem that I encountered today on
tk/Perl.---I moved the mouse around the application,
and noted that different parts of the GUI highlight
differently and with different colors. I also noted
that different text areas have different background
colors. I spent two hours to fix a number of them, in
detail, coding in. An idea that saved time was the
following:

1. define a general color for the background and the
highlight, at the beginning of the code, say:

my $bg_text  = "#efefef";
my $bg_texth = "#adbcd6";

2. state the following in the option area of relevant
widgets:

-background => $bg_text,
-highlightcolor => $bg_texth,
-highlightbackground => $bg_text,

The result is that those widgets now have consistent
look and feel. The problem is, that I still have to
specify this detail for each relevant widget, coding
by hand. And I am lucky I do not have to do that with
an  Interface Builder, clicking around hundreds of
time on various panels. Now, the idea is to specify
this consistent behaviour only one time. The question
is where? I propose to gather all such customizations
in a separate "policy" file, so that, if you have k
entries  you just write the policy once.

Regards,
Bob



 
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