Re: [Caml-list] Cross-platform "Hello, World" graphical application in OCaml

["Grégory Guyomarc'h" <gregory@guyomarch.org>]

Dear Caml-list,

<rich@annexia.org> said:
> On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 12:36:53AM -0600, Ken Rawlings wrote:
> > My experiences building Kog were overall positive. However, writing a
> > full-featured GUI from scratch is a lot of work, so Kog is likely to
> > remain a toy implementation for the foreseeable future. If there's
> > much interest in the OCaml community for this sort of thing though,
> > I'd love to work with a group on a project getting a full-featured
> > lightweight GUI up and running with OCaml, whether it be on OpenGL
> > directly, or one of the higher level vector libraries.
> 
> I think this would be the wrong direction to go.
> 
> What I think would be useful is an OCaml wrapper around Gtk, Win32 and
> Aqua/COCOA.  The idea would be for the OCaml wrapper to abstract away
> the differences, allowing cross-platform programming with native
> widgets.  WxWidgets fits the bill here, but the actual API is clunky.
> I have a feeling that something could be done better with a functional
> programming approach.

I think it has not yet been mentioned in this thread, but as far as I
understand it, the java Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) do just that. It
acts as a thin layer above the native toolkits (in fact it seems above
the simpler widgets like buttons, labels, etc, others like menu bars are
re-implemented in java). It already supports an impressive set of
backends: gtk, windows, carbon, photon, and motif. I don't know how well
the API compares to wxWidgets', I have never used any of them, but it
seems quite popular.

Here are some links,

http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-SWT-Design-1/SWT-Design-1.html
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/platform-swt-home/dev.html?rev=1.228
http://www.developer.com/java/other/article.php/2179061

> Of course it's a lot of tedious engineering work.  I'm not
> volunteering!
> 
> Rich.
> 
> -- 
> Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
> Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
> Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business -
> http://team-notepad.com

Sincerely,

Gregory.