Hi,
I intended to post this a bit later, not before some usable code is
available, but I changed my opinion, it may be useful to outline, how
porting will happen.
The most complex part is certainly Dw, since it is tightly bound to
Gtk+. By all means, I want to prevent, that there exist different
versions of Dw, with different features (e.g., when the development of
the Gtk+ version continues, while the FLTK version is developed),
which are hard to integrate.
For this reason (and others), I'm currently working on a redesign of
Dw, which will make Dw toolkit independant. This is not the single
goal of this redesign, it will also make some other features possible,
e.g. a preview window, in which the whole page may be seen with
reduced size, also, it will make reusage of Dw within graphical
plugins possibel, and some more. (Actually, the idea for this design
is already older, except the platform independency, but this was simple
to add.)
I'll soon (within a week or so) post the first usable version of it,
which will only include a small program to test Dw, not dillo itself,
the integration into dillo will be done later. However, it will
already make it possible to start with the porting work.
A documentation, which changes should remain small, is already
attached.
As for the actual port, the following steps should be done:
1. Realize the test program, but for another UI toolkit. This will
still have to include Gtk+, because of the Gtk+ object model,
but the new toolkit should be in control over the event
processing. (Furthermore, GLib will, in this phase, still be
needed.)
What is needed for this step:
(i) an implementation of DwRenderPlatform and DwRenderView,
and
(ii) ports of the modules Dw_style and Dw_tooltip. These will
perhaps also be abstracted, see DwRender.txt for
details.
The rest should not be touched, if this should become necessary,
this is a bug.
The changes in Dw_style and Dw_tooltip should not be too hard,
and these modules will not change much in the near future, so
this simple approach for porting is reasonable in this case. The
experiences made on this should be interesting, if the design of
Dw_style and Dw_tooltip should be enhanced, as described as an
idea in the attached document.
2. The second step (regarding Dw) should be to get rid of Gtk+ and
GLib. Since a port to FLTK is planned, it makes sense to port
the C code to C++, this would also make the code cleaner, since
dealing with classes and interfaces in C (with the Gtk+ model)
is quite fiddly.
Details of this step have still to be clarified, but the
features, GLib and Gtk+ provides, should be relatively easily
replaced.
Notice also, that I plan to make an own library of Dw (at least the
core of it), most of it has already been finished, but the release has
been delayed, because I assign a greater priority to the dillo
project.
For the rest of the port, I do not have any plans, but AFAIS, I see
far less problems as for Dw.
Sebastian
