The way to fix 'openamiga'...

[Karlos]

downix wrote:
The problem with this is that you would then be reinventing the wheel when such an OOP GUI library already exists for all of the platforms:  MUI.

I agree that MUI is fine as it stands but I feel you are missing our point here.

An abstraction layer has many benefits. For MUI and reaction both, such a layer would be very thin.

Enforcing MUI as an interface is not a good idea - plenty of people don't like it, it may not be ideal under one or other versions of the OS (ie OS4).

Having to use MUI or Zune on a system which already has GUI results in an underutilisation of that systems existing abilites and increases the memory overhead of the program (having to load MUI resources etc). Reinventing the wheel as you yourself describe it :-)

By contrast the abstraction layer would be relatively small since it relies on the underlying native GUI to do all the work.

One overwhelming advantage, as codesmith pointed out would be to use an API which is source compatible with one of the Linux APIs which would reduce the work required to port software.

I feel this idea has a lot of potential, but that's my humble opinion :-)

[Karlos]

Kronos wrote:
@Karlos
MUI and ReAction work in quite different ways, so creating an abstraction-layer that fits
both would mean loooooots of work, and result in more overhead and offcourse more bugs.

Okay I can appreciate that. I'm not saying one interface is better than another and I certianly don't have time to get into any kind of "MUI v Reaction" child of "MOS v OS4" crap :-D

I agree its a lot of work. But what is it that the OpenAmiga developer team will be doing all day?

Im sure there are people willing to work towards something like this.

OS4 WILL suffer from that the problems you described anyways, as atleast one of
the contributions is allready bound to MUI.

Well perhaps. But bear in mind that not everybody will use every contribution that comes along.

ReAction has been the official way for years now, but is still only sparsley used, while
MUI is seen as the standard by a majority of the Amiga-coders.

Trying to change that by force will fail, maybe even make coders turn their back.

Nobody is saying they would have to. Its clear many MUI coders wouldn't want to touch anything else. There are also reaction coders that feel the same.
Heck, even gadtools has its fans.

What this is about is giving those coders that want to a nice consistent API that doesn't depend ultimately on any particular underlying GUI.

Also, a well constructed OOP abstraction layer adds the possibilities that apps like games etc can provide their own GUIs and still use the same setup/event processing code in the internals.

One of the biggest problem is the use of mui custom classes for which there are no equivalents in other GUIs. However, not every application needs every esoteric gui element in its interface...