RFC on how to start using wxWidgets.

[Jurko Gospodnetić]

   Hi all.

   We are newcomers to wxWidgets and have been doing some research on it 
to see if our company could use it for some platform independent GUI 
development.

   We read the wxWidgets book (which got us seriously hooked :-)), 
surfed the resources on the net for more detailed information and even 
implemented a few simple GUI applications to test everything out.

   Here are some of our thoughts on how to use wxWidgets in our projects 
and we would be grateful if anyone could comment on them and tell us if 
we missed some potential problems with this approach.

   * We plan on using our old compiler/IDEs (mostly Microsoft Visual 
Studio 7.1) and edit wxWidget forms using a separate designer 
application. Designing GUIs without a visual designer tool would seem to 
cause way too many maintenance headaches and increase the time needed to 
design a single GUI element to way over any acceptable limit.

   * We plan on storing GUI layouts in .xrc files. This would allow us 
to easily design forms with model-GUI connections being maintained 
manually on the model side. GUI layout can be loaded from code or if 
needed automatically converted to C++ code as a part of the automated 
build process so we do not see a problem with this.

   * We do not like the idea of some designer tool automatically 
modifying our model code and setting up the minimal needed model-GUI 
connection from code seems like the correct way to go. We can always use 
code samples generated by a designer as templates but the resulting code 
would not be under any designer's control. Any changes relating to the 
model need to be typed in (and processed) explicitly by the programmer.

   * This approach is highly based on the fact that all visual control 
properties get stored in the .xrc file.

   * We like the sizer concept for designing GUI layouts and plan on 
using them exclusively.


   Thank you in advance for reading this.

   Best regards,
     Jurko Gospodnetić