C++ Adobe source libraries impressions?

Question

hello

I just stumbled upon Adobe source libraries, ASL. It is set of templates and functions similar to boost, under MIT license. Some of the utilities in the library I found quite useful and now I consider using it.

the library seems pretty straightforward, however.

• Have you used ASL yourself? if so, what were your impressions? do you recommend it?
• does it work well with a range of compilers and platforms e.g. IBM C++, ICC, g++?
• have you encountered quirks/unexpected things?

thanks

Answer 1

1. ASL uses Boost heavily, so it's not such similar to Boost, as (in some cases) a relatively thin wrapper around Boost.
2. The "big" pieces of ASL are Adam and Eve. Most of the rest appears to be (and if memory serves, really is) little more than support for those.
3. ASL hasn't been updated in a while, and if I'm not mistaken some of what it provides in wrappers around Boost has now been incorporated into the Boost libraries themselves (most Boost authors have been aware of ASL at least since they featured in Sean Parent's keynote presentation at Boostcon 1).

My own experience with them has been somewhat mixed. At one time, I used a couple of their Boost-wrapper classes a bit, but IIRC, within the next release or two, the bits I cared about were available in Boost without any wrappers (though offhand, I don't remember exactly what those pieces were...)

Adam and Eve are kind of cool for playing around with different UI layouts and such -- but I've never used them for a finished version of a program. At least to me, it appears that they're useful primarily with a relatively complex UI. My impression was that if you find them very useful, your UI probably needs work. If you need Adam and Eve to help understand what's going on, chances are your users can't figure out either.

OTOH, there are probably at least a few cases where a dialog is clear to a user, but the code much less so to a developer. If you do a lot of disabling some controls until values have been entered in other controls, and such, it can make it a lot easier to ensure controls are disabled until all values they depend upon have been entered.

Answer 2

As already noted, thew whole point of ASL is Adam and Eve, the rest are just handy tools.

Adam & Eve work together to describe UI with auto-layout in a cross-platform way. If this is not what you need, then you should probably not spend much time on ASL.

Eve has the typical collection of vertical/horizontal/other containers for auto-layout.

And scripting with Adam allows you to achieve things difficult (if not impossible) to achieve just with layout containers (things like keeping separate groups of controls the same size, for instance).

True, you implement some of the rules in your C++ code. But it makes sense to store the UI description rules related to UI behavior in the same place where you store the UI to begin with.