## A.3 Status and problems

The current version of the Dialog Editor is experimental. It can be used for serious application development as the output format is extensible, so future extensions to the Dialog Editor will not break already generated dialog windows. The main problems identified are:

- Defining new controls
  It is desirable to be able to create new (compound) controls using the dialog editor and save these in a library. At the moment new controls can only be created by programming them as a user-defined class. Connecting these user-defined controls to the Dialog Editor is not difficult, but no supported interface has been defined.
- Layout detection
  The layout detection often makes mistakes, partly because it does not know about various important layout concepts.
- Integration with user-defined classes
  It is desirable to integrate the dialog editor in a neat way with user-defined classes. Notably, the editor should support activating and defining methods on a user-defined refinement of the containing frame.