Wolfgang Thaller wrote:
In any case, my bottom line is that, even if you provide a portable geometry management mechanism, I ought to be able to just use actual XmForm, XmRowColumn etc widgets for the Motif version of an application. In particular, stylistic attributes (e.g. spacing, margins) which are set via resources need to be respected.
We could just add a platform-specific extension for the Motif backend. If somebody wants to implement a portable XmForm "clone", we could move it to the CGA proper.
I think that the key issue is abstraction. Most of the API, and most of the code which uses it, should be able to work with whatever widgets are passed to it. Using a platform-specific widget class should involve a minor change to the UI construction code; it shouldn't require changes to the rest of the code.
2) Such platform-specific functions must be clearly marked as such. I suggest that we follow the example of OpenGL and mark extensions using a suffix to the name, e.g. mkXmForm_EXT, loadNibFile_EXT, etc.
I'd rather just use modules and qualified names.
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Glynn Clements