[Dev] Some info on Gecko, themes, XUL and wxWindows

[Rob OConnor]

Hi OSA team,

I saw your project and looked through your pages.
Looks like you are off to a great start! I am looking
forward to using your betas.

I read the threads last month, and thought I would
contribute some things that may be helpful:

-The author of the wxWindows wxHtmlWindow classes
(Vaclav Slavic) has planned a wxHtmlWindow2 type of
class, that wraps Gecko. You may wish to communicate
with him (if you haven't already) to see if you wish
to collaborate in any way.

-There is XRC (Xml Resources) in wxWindows, that can
go a long way of separating out the interface from the
code and leave the interface in a very modifiable
format for 3rd party resellers. Themes, branding, etc
is easily done, as it is just additions, or finds and
replaces in a regular XML file. Themes then make for a
fairly easy implementation, as can then just do a run
time switching of XML resources. It also helps the UI
team and coding team not introduce bugs in each
other's work. I have used in the project I was working
on, and liked it so much that I also wrote the
/contrib/samples/xrc tutorial demo program that comes
with the wxWindows package.

I have finished up a Free Software wxWindows project
over the last year (which also uses Python as its
parser, actually). It has fared well against its
closed source competitor (AvantGo). While downloads of
our Free Software are continually increasing and now
about 70,000 a month, AvantGo [with its greedy fees of
often around $300,000 per license] has now gone
delisted off NASDAQ and the CEO has resigned. 

In case there is anything useful that you can pillage
from this wxWindows program, the downloads, sourcecode
and dev/user documentation are at
http://desktop.plkr.org
I don't know if there is anything there that would be
helpful, but may he of assistance to see some little
bit already done in wxWindows, like the wxWindows
implementation to make a show/hide details progress
dialog as seen in Outlook. Things are fairly logically
laid out, and the interfaces are all documented (I
used Doxygen, which I found to have good results).

Best wishes,
Robert


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