What Features Should A GUI toolkit have?

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 7 March 2015 at 07:33:03 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Fri, 2015-03-06 at 11:30 +0000, via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> […]
>> 
>> Not sure what you mean by a "non-browser UI". You need a 
>> model, a layout engine, a composition engine and know-how. 
>> Competing with browser engines is a lot of work.
>
> I meant a user interface not using a browser as the 
> infrastructure.
> Cocoa, Qt, GTK, JavaFX, etc. are all there already, and have 
> everything
> browsers are still trying to get. I agree the pressure of 
> fashion and
> orthodoxy is moving to HTML and JavaScript as the one true UI 
> framework,
> but it's only real positive is that it is (supposed to be) 
> pre-installed
> and the same on every machine. Sadly though, from what I can 
> see, vast
> amounts of code and time is spent dealing with the differences 
> between
> browsers.
>
>> It is going to be very hard to compete with reusable UI 
>> components implemented in html+javascript, when they have 
>> worked out the quirks, due to:
>> 
>> 1. ease of development
>> 2. ease of modification
>> 3. volume of UI components
>> 4. styling know-how
>> 5. integration
>> 6. installed base
>
> HTML and Javascript may have an edge on ease of deployment, but
> regarding the other dimensions, I fear you must have imbibed of 
> the
> Kool-Aid. I agree that most people creating UIs do so with 
> browsers,
> HTML and JS, but that doesn't mean they are doing it right or 
> not
> blindly recreating from scratch a whole mass of things that 
> were already
> known. We would be a lot further forward today on UI and UX if 
> people in
> the Web arena had researched more and taken NIH attitudes less. 
> Clearly
> new technology and new application require new things, but 
> simply
> ignoring already known stuff is just wrong.

I'm the first who would welcome a better approach to UIs. 
However, in the real world you cannot wait until the industry 
finally "gets it". You cannot tell users "Yeah, no, we won't make 
an app, because we are not happy with existing frameworks, you 
know".

I hate JS for various reasons, one reason is that HTML5/JS makes 
you reinvent the wheel again and again. However, while 
reinventing the wheel, it helps you to understand that existing 
frameworks are not the be all end all either.

>> What you need is a reactive layer that access native data. And 
>> webtech provides the basic building blocks for it, thanks to 
>> the requirements of asm.js/pnacl.