GSoC Idea: Megawidget development

Areas Tk, GUI
Good if student knows Tcl
Priority ???
Difficulty easy(-ish)
Benefits to the student Practical experience in design and implementation of a widget framework
Benefits to Tcl A consistent widget system making use of new core functionality. A good base for further building of custom widgets in pure Tcl code by the whole community
Mentor Jeff Hobbs? Sean Woods?

Project Description

Based on TclOO (Tcl's built-in object system), translate and update the plethora of megawidgets into a single, unified megawidget system that can be "core" blessed. Would involve extensive use of OO, x-platform UI, event-driven coding, etc.

References

Comments

DKF: I want more megawidgets, I want to know how good Tk 8.6 is for building megawidgets, I'd love to see a set of TclOO base classes for megawidget support, and I'm very keen on learning what things need to be added at the C level to make megawidgets easier/better. This is an ideal thing for a GSoC project, as it doesn't need a lot of complicated programming, and the return on the student's effort is very immediate.

LV: at the very least, it would be beneficial for someone to do a review of several existing megawidget frameworks (both within the Tk community and outside), producing a set of requirements for a framework that, when implemented, would provide a rich set of functions to create a set of megawidgets that are Tk/Ttk like in behavior, and make use of TclOO for classing, etc. If a rich enough framework would be available, it could potentially replace incr Tk, and then work could proceed rewriting incr Widgets.

DKF: Tk 8.6 has a small core for megawidgets that is used to drive the core of the iconlist widget (used in the Unix version of tk_getOpenFile).

RZ See also TIP #180 [L1 ] (Add a Megawidget Support Core Package) and Object vs. Megawidget

JOB High priority from my side! Yes please, I would like to see a standardized way to build TclOO/tile-based megawidgets.