Re: About porting to Qt.

[Peter Wainwright]

On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 15:19 +0200, jose maria gomez wrote:
> Hello, I am Jose Maria, the new offcial maintainer of DDD package. I am still 
> having a look to the source and thinking about what could be the betters 
> plans for DDD and which could be the better way to do it.
> 
> One of the things I would like to do is to port DDD to Qt gui libraries. 
> Anyway, this is not trivial. First of all, DDD need a lot of work to decouple 
> GUI from "logic".

Good news that someone has volunteered to replace Andrew.

I don't know if you are aware, but I have already started a project to
write a new GUI backend which can use the Gtkmm widget set.  This is in
the "branches/gddd" directory of the Subversion repository.

As a result I have already decoupled most of the logic from the backend
widget set.  All the communication goes through a shim or "virtual"
widget set (GUI::Widget, GUI::Container, GUI::Button...).

You may find that you can just write another backend for this interface.
Otherwise, I hope that the interface can be easily modified to support
both Qt and Gtkmm, as well as maybe others yet to be invented.  I did
hope that my interface would support more widget sets than just Gtkmm,
but I didn't have enough experience of Qt to try writing anything using
Qt.

Basically you would have a "QtX::" widget which would just be a
container for the real Qt widget.  The callbacks need to appear in the
main program as libsigc++ signals, which are similar to but not
identical to Qt signals.  I should think it is quite possible (maybe
even fairly easy) to catch Qt signals and translate them to the libsigc
++ format.  I did the same for the Motif (Xt) callbacks, in order to
provide a backward-compatible version which would run on Motif.  I'm no
longer actively developing that code, but it worked quite well as far as
it went.

I posted some ideas at http://www.ceiriog.eclipse.co.uk/ddd-gtk.pdf

Peter Wainwright (pwainwright at users.sourceforge.net)

> 
> I will inform all of you as soon as posible about the plans. Everybody can 
> help of course and your feedback is very important.
> 
> The application is in C, so i would like to rewrite most of them to moderm 
> C++ 
> and put QT over all. At the same time I think that a good pluggin system 
> could be really useful in this case.
> 
> Thanks a lot. 
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