[lazarus] Designer GLADE usage

[Marc Weustink]

+ From: Michael A. Hess [mailto:mhess at miraclec.com]


+ Right now we are setting here looking at the effort to built the
+ designer and not really knowing where to start or attack it.
+ With GLADE the interface is already available and available on
+ several platforms.
+ The other advantage is that even if we develop our own designer which
+ saves info in an XML file we need a way to go from the XML to either
+ Pascal code turning it into a resource that is linked into the
+ application.
+
+ Since GLADE already saves it's data into an XML file we can
+ work on this portion of the tool. We can work on converting
+ the XML data into something that can be used in an LCL bases
+ application. Once we have that worked out with the GLADE output
+ we can then start working on our own designer that saves XML
+ output. The work spent on GLADE will be of value and give us
+ some RAD capabilities sooner.

I don't know if I'm to happy with this approach. Is Glade GTK based or can
you define your own widget set. If you can define your own widget set I cant
see how they will be shown. So I guess you never are able to design
something native LCL with it. Unless you take a large amount of time to
convert things I think the look and feel of your designed form wont be the
same. Further more how do you want to handle the on the fly creation of
control and event entries in your source. If this is not supported, I see
something created as braindead as M$VC.

Ok it is a nice tool to generate an xml template for your form. If we want
to use it for a quick design of a form, as a separate tool, OK, but I think
we shouldn't take effort into integrating it into Lazarus. IMO if we do
that, we kill a great advantage Lazarus/Delphi has.
Better put effort in creating forms form xml.

Marc