[DotGNU]Reopening the GUI discussion

[Peter Minten]

Hi folks,

I'd like to reopen the discussion about the official GUI for DotGNU. In the last
message of that discussion GTK was chosen, after looking at the big alternative
(FOX) I came to the conclusion that the choice for GTK might be impractical.

The reason for this is that FOX allows almost all properties of a widget to be
set by events, GTK does not IIRC. When separating the GUI from the rest of the
code (GUI on client) this makes things much easier than with toolkits like GTK,
because you basically only have to create a mechanism for passing events and
write a little support code to get the GUI working.

An example of DotGNU using FOX:

* Button on client is pressed
* Button sends message to client DotGNU object
* Client DotGNU object translates message to GNU-RPC and sends it to butler
* Butler wraps message and sends it to server
* Server DotGNU object decodes message and sends to the event handler of the
code coupled to this event of the button.
* Button code is executed and sends message to server DotGNU object.
* Server DotGNU object translates message to GNU-RPC and sends to client
* Butler unwraps message and sends to client DotGNU object
* Client DotGNU object decodes message and sends to setText event handler of
label.
* Label changes text

In this scenario at the beginning of a webservice session code is send to the
client to set up the GUI, after that the client goes into an event loop and only
acts as transmitter between user and server. The nice thing about this setup is
that a single newbie with some experience in FOX could code the client part.

Greetings,

Peter