[webkit-dev] Widget / Drawing API thoughts

[Kent Sandvik]

On 6/19/05, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:

> > The problem with inheriting from platform-independent base classes is
> that you would have to use multiple inheritance to get the
> inheritance hierarchy right. For instance, QCheckBox would have to
> inherit from QButton *and* from QCheckBoxBase, which QButton would
> have to inherit from QButtonBase. I think this would be needlessly
> complex, and I guess whole separate implementations of the widgets
> are likely to be fine.

Yes, it would be cleaner if each platform had their own
platform-specific implementation in a separate source directory, if
there's anything common that never needs a platform-specific file, it
could be placed in a src/common dir or something similar. Note that
you could have C++ member functions for a class that could be
implemented in the system-specific dir, *as well as* common member
function implementations that don't need any platform code.

One step in the current build tree would be to separate the KWQ header
files into a separate directory, and move the existing implementation
files into a macosx dir, as I assume most of the code is
macosx-centric, anyway. Then there could be a migration moving some of
the code into a src/common or something similar.

I could help out with that in case this part of the project starts,
but usually it's best if one person does the big surgical operation
and checks it all in.

--Kent