Re: [Freeciv-Dev] FreeCiv Shareware competitor

[Esben Haabendal Soerensen <ehs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 4 Nov 1998, John Goerzen wrote:

> Mitch Davis <mjd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
> > I agree.  That's what I'm saving 1.8 for.  I want to release 1.7.2
> > as the last Xaw-only version, then work towards 1.8 being an Xaw/GTK+
> > version.
> 
> As far as I'm concerned, you could/should drop Xaw completely.  GTK is 
> extremely portable these days.

Agree.  Xaw stinks!
All the worst (read ugliest and most user-unfriendly) GUI's are made
with Xaw.  Not that the FreeCiv gui is that bad ;-)  but it is not
so nice looking, and the nice feature about the mouse pointer focus
is really annoying.

> > Well, the port is finished in that it runs on GTK+ fine, but I still
> > would like to see only one set of client code, that goes through a layer
> > to determine which widget set to use.
> 
> If you really want to do this, the Linuxconf folks have already
> written a layer that may or may not be appropriate.  The LyX folks are 
> apparently working on such a thing as well, as are a few other
> groups.  It seems a popular thing to be doing these days, but I'd
> suggest just going for GTK.

Why ?
A complete separation of the GUI and the rest of the client with a
well specified layer / API is really a win.
It might look slightly more tedious in the start, but I am sure it
will pay of in the end.
The code will be more modular, easier to maintain and it will be easy
to adopt a new user interface.
It would also open up for writing an interface to popular scripting
language.
What about a Perl or Python interface for writing you own helpers ?

-- 
/Esben  (bart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx)

: But for some things, Perl just isn't the optimal choice.

(yet)   :-)
             -- Larry Wall in <199702221943.LAA20388@xxxxxxxx>