2004-11-18, 02:00 PM
I'm putting together a library of widgets (data structures, controls that will render to the screen, etc) to at least help me to refactor some of my code, and to make future development a little easier.
I'm wondering what the interest level would be among plugin developers to have a common library of reusable components. I mean, it's easy enough to just copy and paste code from one plugin into another, but the result tends to be a little messy.
When I say "control", I mean a component that is very much like Windows form controls. The developer can set properties that effect the rendered output without necessarily worrying about how the details of the control is implemented.
For instance, a Frame control would have certain properties (size and position, border style, color, etc), and when told to render, would draw a frame on the screen. This alone is not much different than sub's DrawRoundRect() method, except that a Frame control might be able to draw both a square and a rounded rectangle, selectable by a setting of the current skin. The plugin designer would just need to create a Frame object, set properties, then tell the Frame to render when it needs to. In addition, maybe the Frame is a container control (a control that contains other controls).
If there is interest, and others would like to contribute to the library, then perhaps I'll set up a SourceForge project for it to enable the proper collaboration (and to facilitate public access to the latest codebase).
I'm wondering what the interest level would be among plugin developers to have a common library of reusable components. I mean, it's easy enough to just copy and paste code from one plugin into another, but the result tends to be a little messy.
When I say "control", I mean a component that is very much like Windows form controls. The developer can set properties that effect the rendered output without necessarily worrying about how the details of the control is implemented.
For instance, a Frame control would have certain properties (size and position, border style, color, etc), and when told to render, would draw a frame on the screen. This alone is not much different than sub's DrawRoundRect() method, except that a Frame control might be able to draw both a square and a rounded rectangle, selectable by a setting of the current skin. The plugin designer would just need to create a Frame object, set properties, then tell the Frame to render when it needs to. In addition, maybe the Frame is a container control (a control that contains other controls).
If there is interest, and others would like to contribute to the library, then perhaps I'll set up a SourceForge project for it to enable the proper collaboration (and to facilitate public access to the latest codebase).
JasonF