In article <✉forums.codegear.com>, Luigi Sandon wrote:

> > about cross-platform frameworks is that they provide a platform-
> > agnostic API for accessing the native widget set of each platform.
> 
> There's something contradictory in what you wrote - who cares of an
> *agnostic* access to the *native set of each platform*? <G>

I don't see any contradiction there. The framework provides an API that 
the application uses to control the GUI, but the actual actions of the 
API calls vary appropriately from platform to platform. The framework 
presents the same API to the application on all platforms, but the 
actual implementation of that API is platform specific, and behaves 
appropriately for the target system.


So, the API is platform-agnostic (the application doesn't have to know 
or care what the target system is) but the implementation behind that 
API uses the platform's native widget set in the conventional way for 
the platform.

> ... GUIs are much more than a set of widgets.

Indeed they are, which is why cross-platform toolkits are complex 
frameworks ... if it were just a matter of switching widgets you'd only 
need a bunch of macros.

> > They don't care HOW Delphi does it, they care that it works.
> 
> Well, now I am very worried... I believed most developers where far
> better than VB coders, and cared about how Delphi works. Maybe I am
> wrong.

You're missing the point. I didn't mean that developers don't care how 
Delphi works during the process of coding with Delphi, I meant that they 
didn't choose Delphi over other tools because of the way that it works; 
they chose it because it *does* work, and then learnt about how.


Cheers,
 Daniel.