[Bf-committers] Declarative UI Experiment

[Roger Wickes]

awesomeness. the philosophical advantage is that this puts the User interface 
definition clearly in the hands of the User. No Python coding needed, just an 
XML editor (or text if you are hard-pressed). Anytime you can abstract data from 
hard code, it's a good thing (even if py is interpreted etc -  it's still code). 


--Roger


note to self: resume long term goal to make an xml exporter/importer so we can 
put blend files under meaningful change control...




----- Original Message ----
From: Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com>
To: bf-blender developers <bf-committers at blender.org>
Sent: Sun, August 8, 2010 11:36:47 AM
Subject: [Bf-committers] Declarative UI Experiment

There are some concerns I have with the current UI code so yesterday I
looked into declarative UI's (Mozilla's XUL and some others) and wrote
a working, experimental XML method for defining panels/menus/headers.

Comparisons with render dimension and stamp panel (XML misses poll functions)
http://www.pasteall.org/14880/python
http://www.pasteall.org/14879/xml

Before I go any further I should say that this is something I did in
my spare time yesterday because I wanted to look into an alternative,
its not a BF supported project :)
Also, I'm not especially interested in XML, This could be JSON, a
Python dictionary or our own markup.

The XML to RNA translator will currently run if you start blender in
debug mode (--debug argument). just to show this is working.
the script that does this is scripts/modules/bpy_xml_ui.py
notice it has no hard coded rna functions, the XML names are passed
directly to RNA so its just a thin wrapper.

...