On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 09:08:48PM +0100, chris.danx wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Was looking on the web for an alternative to using GTK+ on Windows (no 
> flames please) and found WxWidgets.  It looks like a quite nice GUI 
> toolkit.  There seemed to be some interest in developing a OCaml binding 
> via Swig according to the net, but I can't find any such binding.
> 
> Has anyone made such a binding?  If not I was thinking about using swig 
> and the wxpython interfaces as the starting point for a wxwidgets 
> binding for ocaml.  Has anyone tried to do this in the past?  Any 
> thoughts on the issue?

I've looked into this in the past, but we ended up using Gtk +
Gtk-Wimp on Windows, which worked quite well.  Here are my
observations on going the WxWindows route though:

(1) WxWindows is pretty good.  (Ah, looking at their website, I see
they've renamed it to WxWidgets!).  WxWIDGETS is pretty good.  It's a
very complete way to develop cross-platform applications.  In
particular, it has platform-specific file and print dialogs, which you
won't get if you use Gtk.  In fact if you use Gtk you won't get print
dialogs at all - I had to write my own print dialog for Windows which
was no fun at all.

(2) There seem to be three decent approaches to using WxWidgets under
OCaml: Python, Perl or native.  Native is going to be the best, but is
going to take a heck of a lot of effort.

(3) Python or Perl: it's easiest just to use PyCaml or Perl4Caml to
interface with the Wx* libraries under those languages.  I don't see
why you'd want to go through SWIG for this.

(4) Native: definitely the best performance and the cleanest approach,
however it's lots of work.  (Now of course if you wanted to *hire*
Merjis to do the work, contact me off-list ... :-)

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://www.j-london.com/
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - improving website return on investment
"One serious obstacle to the adoption of good programming languages is
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languages as in life, speed kills." -- Mike Vanier