Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Ethereal GUI

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From: ListSrv <listsrv@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 08:55:59 +0100
How about using WXWINDOWS.... ? It's multiplatform..... and native...

gr,

Willem

Guy Harris wrote:


On Nov 17, 2003, at 3:04 PM, Gerald Combs wrote:

- The interface layout is easy to change, since it's defined by the
  XUL files.

- Much (but not all) of the code is automatically generated.


If that's easier than hand-coding GTK+ (or Qt, or Aqua, or Win32) code, that *alone* might make it worth doing....

Note, though, that menus would, at least in part, be per-platform; for example, "Preferences" would be under the "Ethereal" menu in Mac OS X, but under some other menu on other platforms. Multiple XUL files, in cases where there's a real UI difference due to different conventions/rules on different platforms, probably wouldn't be too bad (and if you can do the equivalent of #includes in XUL files - does SGML/XML support that? - there might be even more common code available).

Can this handle "custom" widgets - or subclassing existing widgets? We might want to do that for the packet list, to implement, for example, a list where the text in the columns is supplied by callbacks and not even generated for packets that aren't visible.

Does this seem like a viable approach?


It does to me.

(Longhorn will have an XML-based language for GUIs:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/ dnfoghorn/html/foghorn10272003.asp

and Mac OS X Interface Builder nib files are XML (I think there might also be a non-XML NeXTStEP format as well); it appears that Glade also uses XML, and Qt Designer uses - wait for it - XML to describe UI stuff. So who had that idea first? Mozilla? Or did somebody do it before them?)

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