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XMLUI

blog.jonudell.net

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Re: XMLUI

#281

Post by hermitcrab »

jdranczewski wrote: post #274
hermitcrab wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us are still programming in Qt using just C++ and .ui files. Never bothered to switch to QML. I wasn't convinced there were enough advantages to make it worth the effort.

I've been writing a UI framework for experiment automation and small tools using Qt Widgets with Python bindings ( https://puzzlepiece.readthedocs.io ) and it still works pretty well! I like the API, and it being immediately cross-platform is very useful. It does lack looks on Windows a little imo, but to be honest I'm not opposed to the utilitarian way the apps end up looking.

The 'Fusion' style on Windows looks a bit slicker than the base Windows style IMO.

Re: XMLUI

#282

Post by junon »

asadotzler wrote: post #249
BrenBarn wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was a big missed opportunity. The frustrating thing about web UIs is that they don't obey my system-level display preferences (for stuff like fonts and colors). XUL was an approach that did that. Whether it's XML or something else is not the big issue, it's more a question of how to use a declarative style to specify a UI in a way that blends with the user's display preferences.

If memory serves, the system style stuff was a bolt on that Dave Hyatt did a bit later than the core work, and mostly for Windows. The one theme for all platforms that was initially envisioned by Netscape kinda sucked ("Blue" for anyone that might remember.) And when Ben Goodger began his native-looking theme for Windows (pretty sure he started with preferences, maybe even before he got hired,) Dave got to work on Wi…

This is an incredible piece of lore, thank you for sharing!

Re: XMLUI

#283

Post by bmn__ »

mnafees wrote: post #64

I wrote Qt C++ for 7 years as an open source contributor to KDE. This reminds me of QtWidgets’ .ui files—custom XML files following a specific schema. Later, Qt introduced QML, which I personally found unintuitive, and over time I lost interest in Qt altogether. That said, I still think XML for UI definitions makes sense, and it’s understandable that some larger environments continue to use it.

XMLUI has 3%-4% of the features in designer. They have to catch up with 30 years first until it's worth a second look.

Re: XMLUI

#284

Post by madeofpalk »

wiremine wrote: post #199

Jon has been around for a long time, and I've been a long-time fan. He's a bit of an elder: he's seen a lot of things, and he's worth listening to. > I’m a fan of web components but it’s the React flavor that dominate and they are not accessible to the kind of developer who could productively use Visual Basic components back in the day. I think this is the most important statement in the piece. The rest of the post e…

The funny thing about this - and I don't know whether this is as good or a bad thing - is that you could probably almost implement this XMLUI entirely in React/JSX.

Glancing over the markup, none of this seems too alien to React.

This all seems not too dissimilar to the generic pages-as-JSON DSL that every CMS/developer reinvents every other project.

Re: XMLUI

#285

Post by Timwi »

When it started talking about mimicking the experience of Visual Basic, I was excited, because I have fond memories of that (and Borland Delphi after it) and its ability to let me design a window/dialog layout in a WYSIWYG manner,

But then it showed XML code (which of course I saw coming, given the title) and I was immediately reminded of WPF with its XAML, which was a nightmare for me. The excitement was instantly replaced with great disappointment :(

I'll readily admit that I haven't tried it so I don't know how much like WPF/XAML it'll be, but it's pretty clear it won't be like Visual Basic or Delphi.

Re: XMLUI

#286

Post by donatj »

esprehn wrote: post #196

This was tried with Polymer way back in 2014 too, ex. making network requests with - https://github.com/PolymerElements/iron-ajax There was also Adobe Flex of the similar era that exists these days as Apache Royale: https://apache.github.io/royale-docs/features/mxml There was also XAML and inside Microsoft they made NetUI and FlexUI to make Office 2007+ too. It all seems great on paper, but in practice the markup abs…

At my first job, our most senior developer and my mentor was huge on Flex and instant it was going to be the next big thing.

At the time I thought it was inflexible to style and felt very non-native.

To be fair, it had its moment, moreso in desktop applications than on the web. I seem to remember a lot of installers being developed in Flex. The iPhone showed up just in time to kill it before it ever got its footing on the web.

Re: XMLUI

#287

Post by happyweasel »

hermitcrab wrote: post #92
mnafees wrote: post #64

I wrote Qt C++ for 7 years as an open source contributor to KDE. This reminds me of QtWidgets’ .ui files—custom XML files following a specific schema. Later, Qt introduced QML, which I personally found unintuitive, and over time I lost interest in Qt altogether. That said, I still think XML for UI definitions makes sense, and it’s understandable that some larger environments continue to use it.

Some of us are still programming in Qt using just C++ and .ui files. Never bothered to switch to QML. I wasn't convinced there were enough advantages to make it worth the effort.

I always wanted to check out https://qskinny.github.io/ it looks compelling and sticks to c++

Re: XMLUI

#288

Post by okanat »

nedt wrote: post #280
esprehn wrote: post #196

This was tried with Polymer way back in 2014 too, ex. making network requests with - https://github.com/PolymerElements/iron-ajax There was also Adobe Flex of the similar era that exists these days as Apache Royale: https://apache.github.io/royale-docs/features/mxml There was also XAML and inside Microsoft they made NetUI and FlexUI to make Office 2007+ too. It all seems great on paper, but in practice the markup abs…

Also Mozilla did their app in real XML UI with XUL. But even they themself stopped using it after 20 years.

AFAIK Mozilla still uses XUL to draw their browser UI.

Re: XMLUI

#289

Post by shanghaikid »

cheschire wrote: post #3

No mention of XSLT? Feels like it would be highly relevant since many folks have not considered transforming or styling XML since those days, and would be interested in understanding the huge leap from that to this. And given Jon Udell has written about XSLT before[0], I'm sure this was an intentional decision. Not sure I understand it though. 0: https://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/08/13/udell.html

I remember Blizzard games' website were built by XSLT before, those websites were impressive.

Re: XMLUI

#290

Post by aa-jv »

conradfr wrote: post #271
fxtentacle wrote: post #48

In my opinion, the best GUI approach is still JUCE. Every UI element is a C++ class with a drawing function. You create new UI elements by composing other elements to create another C++ class, for which the editor will auto-generate the source code. For buttons, you have a large if...else... area in the drawing function to handle different states like hover, pressed, active, disabled, etc. Behind the scenes, a thin d…

As a counterpoint, being primarily a web developer (although I did Windows desktop apps with Delphi in the 90s) I hard time doing UI with JUCE. It never really clicked with me and I had a hard time really aligning things, with their Flexbox thing etc, how you set graphic values outside vs inside component classes, being sometimes confused how paint() vs resized() affect things etc. Probably operator error but in the…

JUCE 8's WebView is an abomination that tarnishes an otherwise amazing framework.

Yes, coming from the web, JUCE' Flexbox and paint()/resize() semantics are going to be 'weird' - but thats the point. You have the power to decide when/how to update your GUI, frame by frame - and for high performance GUI's, this is vital.

These days it has to be said: you can get a LOT of your JUCE GUI work done for you by an LLM with great results.

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