Ocaml and (the lack of) RAD tools

Ocaml and (the lack of) RAD tools

[Georges Mariano]

Hello every one,

Following the thread about (the lack of) RAD tools around Ocaml,
may I suggest an idea...

[ooops, first : I'm an ocaml newbie and I don't use (yet) Glade,
so I'm speaking without a clear view of the technical consequences
the following idea may induce...]

Would'nt it be useful to define the coupling between a tool like Glade
and the Ocaml language ???

Briefly, Glade is a (graphical [drag'd drop]) tool used in the building of
GUIs, several
backends are available which make possible to generate the corresponding
code in Perl, Eiffel, ADA95, C, lisp (scheme/guile can't remember)...
[Sorry I have no URL at hand now to provide... may be someone on the list
??]

I can't see why it would be impossible to define an Ocaml backend...

Advantages/Drawbacks ??
Advantages
=========
 Glade relies on GTK, it is largely used by several communities and may
become
a de facto standard for Open Source GUIs
  Since there is at least two "threads/tasks" concerned by Ocaml/GTK binding
  (namely LablGTK and mlGTK), Glade technologie may be accessible at
reasonable
 (human ressource) cost and  can be a "support" or an "advertising"
additional argument
for Ocaml diffusion.
Furthermore, Glade is also based on XML technologie, GUIs descriptions are
stored in *.glade XML files. I just make a few tests which show that these
files
are parsed with simple (ocaml written) XML parsers like 'tony' (I suppose
that
'markup' will also do the job...). So, one part of the job seems to be very
easy...
Drawbacks
=========
The main drawback I can see at the moment : ok, but who will do this job ???
Answer : I don't know.

Just an idea...
PS : Yes, I agree, GUIs development is just a part of RAD process !!! ;-)

Re: Ocaml and (the lack of) RAD tools

[Remi VANICAT]

"Georges Mariano" <georges.mariano@inrets.fr> writes:

> Hello every one,

[snip a lot of think about an ocaml backend for glade]

I'have already look to this posibility, and i believed it won't be so
difficult. I also know thant at some point in his history lablgtk have
a begginning of such tool, but they have drop it, can it be finded
anywhere? 

-- 
Rémi Vanicat
vanicat@labri.u-bordeaux.fr
http://dept-info.labri.u-bordeaux.fr/~vanicat

Re: Ocaml and (the lack of) RAD tools

[Jacques Garrigue]

From: "Georges Mariano" <georges.mariano@inrets.fr>

> Following the thread about (the lack of) RAD tools around Ocaml,
> may I suggest an idea...
> 
> [ooops, first : I'm an ocaml newbie and I don't use (yet) Glade,
> so I'm speaking without a clear view of the technical consequences
> the following idea may induce...]
> 
> Would'nt it be useful to define the coupling between a tool like Glade
> and the Ocaml language ???

Indeed, somebody had this idea in the LablGTK project.
There is a small glade interface that was running at that time.
This was even released in the first alpha version of lablgtk:
ftp://ftp.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/pub/lang/olabl/lablgtk-a01.tar.gz

We just dropped it because what we want is something better integrated
with ocaml: the RAD himself, or at least parts of it, should be
written in ocaml, and for such a goal having to interface the whole of
glade seemed more painful than rewriting it from scratch.

The radtest included in lablgtk-1.00 has an interface very similar to
glade, the only real difference being that you drag and drop to the
tree structure of your window rather than directly on the window
itself. This allows more subtle editing.  What it really lacks is
widgets: only 12 of them are currently available, and with only few of
their options.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacques Garrigue      Kyoto University     garrigue at kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp
		<A HREF=http://wwwfun.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~garrigue/>JG</A>