can this be useful in some way?

[Antonio Macchi <antonio_macchi@alice.it>]

I have written a bash-script that permits to manage some objects like 
buttons, edit-fields, lists, in a fashion roughly like object- oriented
creating those objects, and setting his properties, became possible to 
create every kind of mask on the screen

it has a lot of problems (uses tput/ncurses, not works on every 
terminals, is very slow when lists are too long... )
but may be the approach can be tricky for some kind of operations...

if you have some time, you can take a look
http://www.webalice.it/antonio_macchi/sourcedialog.tar.bz2