Hi John,
Right now, the implementation of such applications is quite unusual (if not to say awkward). But maybe the "librarization" of init as requested by Ben would make this approach feasible for a broader use? Now that I'm writing this paragraph, I feel that this topic deserves some coverage at genodians.org ;-)
Yes, please elaborate on the current situation as well as your thoughts on improving it.
Am I correct to infer that this would also make it easier to add different front-ends to the same "application"?
Yes. The menu-view approach is a pretty radical take of the model-view-controller pattern. There is an almost "galvanic" separation of the view from the application logic because the view lives in a separate component.
Since the relationship between the dialog elements and pixels is local to the view, the view implementation can be easily swapped out.
If you like to experiment with the concept, please have a look at the gems/run/menu_view.run script.
For instance, the VirtualBox Guest Additions have a Shared Clipboard feature. I assumed that this might have to be a Qt-only feature, but if there is a system-wide clipboard, that would be much better.
This is actually already supported by our version of VirtualBox, but Sculpt does not make use of this feature yet.
Cheers Norman