guess what! Progress. I finally got my ass in gear literally took me a month and a half... any way today I completed a method that can take a configuration string to configure the layout of a pane in the aui interface when you add a window to the interface you have to configure the layout of the pane it will be displayed on.
as you can see from this method summery of the AuiPaneInfo there are a lot of options that you might take advantage of.
http://xoomer.virgilio.it/infinity77/AGW_Docs/aui.framemanager.AuiPaneInfo.htmlthe panel manager will work like so. different panels that could be added to the interface will be registered to the manager just like components are registered to the plugin manager requests can then be sent to the manager to dispatch a panel of a specific type. the request can also pass data to be passed the the window class to aid in it's creation. but that message will not have to contain anything data on the panels lay out. that data will be drawn directly from the class. windows classes that will be displayed on a panel will have to have global class properties to define that data. the data will be in the form of a configuration sting. the sting will be a list of words delimited by spaces or comas or any other way as long as they are separated some how. the method I just wrote will create a AUIPaneinfo object and then configure it using the methods in the configuration string pulling data from a hash that used the same method names at the sting as keys when the methods need arguments passed.
if that made no sense to you don;t worry just know that it was literally half the work required to make the panel manager. one of the main reason it took me so long to get back to work on ARC was because up until a few days ago I wasn't sure how I would make it work. now I have a solid idea and I'll hopefully have lots of progress in the next few weeks.
I'm dreading the day I have to start documenting all this properly so that the plugin API can be releaced...