[Chandler-dev] open XRC editor

[John Anderson]

One commercial product, DialogBlocks ($85 at 
http://www.anthemion.co.uk/dialogblocks/), written by Julien Smart of 
wxWidgets fame allows import and export of XRC files. It's also arguably 
one of the best editors out there.

So if we, or other outside developers who owned DialogBlocks, used it 
for developing our dialogs we would not be required to support a 
proprietary format. And it might save us a bunch of time.

John

Morgen Sagen wrote:
> Backstory:  A long time ago I needed to work on the account 
> preferences dialog, and it was suggested that I use XRC files to 
> define the layout.  Of the XRC editors I could find at the time, 
> wxdesigner -- although proprietary -- was the best (meaning it crashed 
> the least often).  Since that time, most of our dialogs have been 
> produced using wxdesigner which stores the "source" of a dialog's 
> layout in some binary format and generates XRC files as output.  This 
> hadn't been too much of a problem since I was doing most of the dialog 
> editing.
>
> However:  Having people need to purchase a proprietary tool to help us 
> out with dialogs isn't going to fly, obviously, as illustrated by 
> comments in this bug:
>
>    https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6471
>
> So the time has come to stop using wxdesigner's binary format as the 
> "source" of our dialogs, and have the XRC files take over that role in 
> order to allow people to use any XRC editor they wish.
>
> I propose we remove the .wdr files from application/dialogs/ and 
> rename the *_wdr.xrc files to *.xrc.  Plus if anyone has experience 
> with any open source XRC editors out there, please reply to this 
> message with your review of the tool.
> _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
>
> Open Source Applications Foundation "chandler-dev" mailing list
> http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/chandler-dev