From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id LAA19133; Sat, 31 Mar 2001 11:31:47 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id LAA19141 for ; Sat, 31 Mar 2001 11:31:46 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from tor.abc.se (ns.abc.se [195.17.72.11]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f2V9Vjf06157 for ; Sat, 31 Mar 2001 11:31:45 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from gateway (dialup-59 [195.17.73.59]) by tor.abc.se (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.3) with SMTP id LAA19651 for ; Sat, 31 Mar 2001 11:31:43 +0200 (MET DST) From: "Mattias Waldau" To: Subject: [Caml-list] Using HTML as a standard GUI for Ocaml Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2001 11:31:43 +0200 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2911.0) X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk - Is the idea below good or bad? - I am looking for ideas how to implement the idea below. - Making some kind of JSP/ASP-package for Ocaml could be a solution, but code likes that gets very messy. - What has been done? Unpublished code? - Alternatives? Using HTML for GUIs =================== Today there exists two flavors of gui for Ocaml based on Tcl or GTK. Tcl is portable, and GTK is becoming portable. What about using HTML-interfaces instead of standard GUIs like Tcl and GTK? The architecture is that you start some kind of HTTP-based server and than you start the browser and go to a local adress like http://localhost:8989/start.html. The advantages are - Portable - Much nicer looking GUI's, it is easier to add pictures, fonts etc to a HTML-gui, than to a Tcl/GTK-based - Many GUI-operations are easier to do in HTML than in a standard GUI-tool, for example HTML-tables are easier to create the listboxes with columns. - Easy to create server-based solutions out of client-applications. Only need to handle state in a general and scalable way. - Smaller executables, for example including GTK statically into Unison increases the size from 700Kb to 2400Kb on Windows. - Easier to integrate with other applikations, since two applications can merged on the HTML-page The disadvantages are - slower - difficult to set focus correctly if the whole page is updated after each input (bugs i IE). This can be solved by being XML-based and talk XML from the browser to the server (which only works on IE>=5 and Netscape 6). - browser incompabilities. (for example HTC in IE makes event very easy to handle, but incompatible with active sheet on Netscape, which is buggy) /mattias ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr. Archives: http://caml.inria.fr