[Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[chris.danx]

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?


Cheers,
Chris

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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[Richard Jones]

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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
the notion that everything has to be sacrificed for speed. In computer
languages as in life, speed kills." -- Mike Vanier

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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[chris.danx]

Richard Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 09:08:48PM +0100, chris.danx wrote:
> 
>>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.

How was that?  Choosing WxWidgets instead of Gtk+ was an option I was 
evaluating (not keen on using gtk+ at all really, it's my least 
favourite gui toolkit).  I might stick with Gtk+ though!  It's not like 
it's a commercial application, it's just for fun and going with Gtk 
means it will actually be completed.


> 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.

Thankfully it's a Tetris clone.  No dialogs required. :)

I plan to develop something more substantial in Ocaml, but for now I'm 
just playing with OpenGL and other things.


> (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.

I wasn't thinking of interfacing to perl or python.  Just using the 
wxWidgets swig interfaces used by wxPython as the start of a binding.  I 
was not sure what kind of effort would be involved in that but from a 
little experiment just now I realised how much effort it would be... 
huge.  The problem with this approach is that the python stuff has to be 
filtered down to a managable size which is likely to be more work than 
starting from scratch.


> (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 ... :-)

If I had the money maybe! :)

*checks last nights lottery ticket* ... two numbers and another number 
just one away for a tenner AGAIN! *sigh*


Chris

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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[Richard Jones]

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On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 10:29:09PM +0100, chris.danx wrote:
> How was that?  Choosing WxWidgets instead of Gtk+ was an option I was 
> evaluating (not keen on using gtk+ at all really, it's my least 
> favourite gui toolkit).  I might stick with Gtk+ though!  It's not like 
> it's a commercial application, it's just for fun and going with Gtk 
> means it will actually be completed.

Because we didn't want to put in the effort to do a native WxWindows
port, and the Perl/Python options would have been too slow and clunky.

> Thankfully it's a Tetris clone.  No dialogs required. :)

That could be a problem.  Check that WxWindows supports a sufficiently
advanced canvas.  It didn't when we were looking at it - we needed the
complex canvas support in Gtk for the real-time updating graphs we
were producing.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://www.j-london.com/
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - improving website return on investment
MONOLITH is an advanced framework for writing web applications in C, easier
than using Perl & Java, much faster and smaller, reusable widget-based arch,
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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[Daan Leijen]

Hi all,

I have created a binding from Haskell to wxWidgets, called wxHaskell.
You can find more information (and nice screenshots) at 
<wxhaskell.sourceforge.net>
There is also a paper about it at <www.cs.uu.nl/~daan/pubs.html>

I also know that there is a student in France that has made a lot of 
progress
on an O'Caml binding to wxWidgets (as he contacted me a few times
about technical issues). He also used the wxEiffel C wrapper (that wxHaskell
uses)

Personally, I am very impressed with wxWidgets: wxHaskell works
very well across the main platforms (MacosX, Windows, and GTK)
and is quite stable. It is also nice that wxWidgets uses native controls
on each platform, giving an application native look-and-feel.

A particularly pragmatic route to implementing a wxWidgets binding
to wxHaskell would adapt the wxDirect program of wxHaskell to generate
O'Caml bindings and just copy the wxHaskell model -- it would fit O'Caml
quite well, especially when OCaml objects are used to model the C++ classes.

Anyway, I hope this helps,
All the best,
 Daan Leijen.

[ps. I probably won't  respond to this thread anymore as I am going to 
ICFP.]

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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[SooHyoung Oh]

I've followed wxHaskell method and implemented some of widgets
with Ocaml.
Implementing all of widgets of wxEiffel C wrapper requires much time,
so I'm finding more systematic method.

Can you give me more hints about your comments about
how to generate Ocaml binding using wxDirect?

Thanks.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Daan Leijen" <daan@cs.uu.nl>
To: "Caml Mailing List" <caml-list@inria.fr>
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 7:00 AM
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?


> Hi all,
>
> I have created a binding from Haskell to wxWidgets, called wxHaskell.
> You can find more information (and nice screenshots) at
> <wxhaskell.sourceforge.net>
> There is also a paper about it at <www.cs.uu.nl/~daan/pubs.html>
>
> I also know that there is a student in France that has made a lot of
> progress
> on an O'Caml binding to wxWidgets (as he contacted me a few times
> about technical issues). He also used the wxEiffel C wrapper (that
wxHaskell
> uses)
>
> Personally, I am very impressed with wxWidgets: wxHaskell works
> very well across the main platforms (MacosX, Windows, and GTK)
> and is quite stable. It is also nice that wxWidgets uses native controls
> on each platform, giving an application native look-and-feel.
>
> A particularly pragmatic route to implementing a wxWidgets binding
> to wxHaskell would adapt the wxDirect program of wxHaskell to generate
> O'Caml bindings and just copy the wxHaskell model -- it would fit O'Caml
> quite well, especially when OCaml objects are used to model the C++
classes.
>
> Anyway, I hope this helps,
> All the best,
>  Daan Leijen.
>
> [ps. I probably won't  respond to this thread anymore as I am going to
> ICFP.]
>
> -------------------
> To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives:
http://caml.inria.fr
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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[skaller]

On Fri, 2004-09-17 at 10:06, SooHyoung Oh wrote:
> I've followed wxHaskell method and implemented some of widgets
> with Ocaml.
> Implementing all of widgets of wxEiffel C wrapper requires much time,
> so I'm finding more systematic method.
> 
> Can you give me more hints about your comments about
> how to generate Ocaml binding using wxDirect?

The program 'flxcc' contained in my Felix package
contains a wrapper generator which generates Felix
bindings from C header files. Perhaps it can be
modified to create Ocaml bindings.

Flxcc uses the Frontc/Cil parser to parse C header
files, and tries to generate a set of wrappers for
each file (including any #include files encountered).
It handles namespaces, overloading, and classes
but not class constructors (can't figure how to mod
the parser to get that right), and cheats on variadic
functions. It detects most sane callbacks automatically.

The process generates bindings for hundreds of files
in the /usr/include tree on my box including the 
C standard library, Python, and GTK. I have no idea
if they all work though :)

Flxcc treats enountered types as abstract, so you will
still need to provide typemapping functions.

An excerpt from the binding generated for gtkstatusbar
is given below. It should be fairly easy to modify
the output to produce Ocaml mli and C glue. An alternative
would be to generate IDL files and run them through
ocamlidl.

module gtk_2_0_gtk_gtkstatusbar_h
{
  open C_hack;
  open glib_2_0_glib_gmem_h;
  open glib_2_0_glib_gslist_h;
  open glib_2_0_glib_gtypes_h;
  open glib_2_0_gobject_gtype_h;
  open gtk_2_0_gdk_gdktypes_h;
  open gtk_2_0_gtk_gtkhbox_h;
  open gtk_2_0_gtk_gtkstyle_h;
   
  //ABSTRACT TYPES
  type _struct__GtkStatusbar = 'struct _GtkStatusbar';
  type _struct__GtkStatusbarClass = 'struct _GtkStatusbarClass';
   
  //C FUNCTION POINTER TYPES
  header '''typedef void
(*gtk_2_0_gtk_gtkstatusbar_h_cft_1)(GtkStatusbar *,  guint,  gchar const
*);''';
  type gtk_2_0_gtk_gtkstatusbar_h_cft_1 =
'gtk_2_0_gtk_gtkstatusbar_h_cft_1';
  header '''typedef void (*gtk_2_0_gtk_gtkstatusbar_h_cft_2)(void);''';
  type gtk_2_0_gtk_gtkstatusbar_h_cft_2 =
'gtk_2_0_gtk_gtkstatusbar_h_cft_2';
   
  //STRUCT or UNION ALIASES
  typedef GtkStatusbarClass = _struct__GtkStatusbarClass;
  typedef GtkStatusbar = _struct__GtkStatusbar;
   
  //PROCEDURES
  proc gtk_statusbar_pop: ptr[GtkStatusbar] * guint =
'gtk_statusbar_pop($a);';
  proc gtk_statusbar_remove: ptr[GtkStatusbar] * guint * guint =
'gtk_statusbar_remove($a);';
  proc gtk_statusbar_set_has_resize_grip: ptr[GtkStatusbar] * gboolean =
'gtk_statusbar_set_has_resize_grip($a);';
                                                                                
  //FUNCTIONS
  fun gtk_statusbar_get_context_id: ptr[GtkStatusbar] * cptr[gchar] ->
guint = 'gtk_statusbar_get_context_id($a)';
  fun gtk_statusbar_get_has_resize_grip: ptr[GtkStatusbar] -> gboolean =
'gtk_statusbar_get_has_resize_grip($a)';
  fun gtk_statusbar_get_type: 1 -> GType = 'gtk_statusbar_get_type($a)';
  fun gtk_statusbar_new: 1 -> ptr[GtkWidget] = 'gtk_statusbar_new($a)';
  fun gtk_statusbar_push: ptr[GtkStatusbar] * guint * cptr[gchar] ->
guint = 'gtk_statusbar_push($a)';

.....

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net



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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[Daan Leijen]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3463 bytes --]

SooHyoung Oh wrote:

>I've followed wxHaskell method and implemented some of widgets
>with Ocaml.
>Implementing all of widgets of wxEiffel C wrapper requires much time,
>so I'm finding more systematic method.
>
>Can you give me more hints about your comments about
>how to generate Ocaml binding using wxDirect?
>  
>
Well,  I think I would rewrite wxDirect -- it is not that much work to 
do this
for OCaml  (maybe 3 days?).  Anyway, wxDirect takes a C header file that
contains *all* wxWidgets wrapper declarations and creates Haskell signatures
from them. As described in the paper, the C header file is somewhat special
as it contains a lot of extra type information (in the form of macros) 
that you
need to generate a proper marshaller. The C header is thus a poor-mans IDL.

We can get away with this, as the number of types and marshalling 
required is
really simple for wxWidges, it is basically integers and pointers to 
objects: no
structures, arrays, general pointers, or nested types.

Anyway, I would also advice you to contact the student I mentioned in my
previous mail -- unfortunately I forgot his name (Francois ?)  I think 
he is a
student of Didier Remy? (or at least another well-known French computer 
scientist).
Anyhow, he made a lot of progress with a wxOCaml binding and from his 
mails I
got the impression that he did a thorough job. I think it can save a lot 
of work to start
from his library.

All the best,
  Daan Leijen.


>Thanks.
>
>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "Daan Leijen" <daan@cs.uu.nl>
>To: "Caml Mailing List" <caml-list@inria.fr>
>Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 7:00 AM
>Subject: Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?
>
>
>  
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>I have created a binding from Haskell to wxWidgets, called wxHaskell.
>>You can find more information (and nice screenshots) at
>><wxhaskell.sourceforge.net>
>>There is also a paper about it at <www.cs.uu.nl/~daan/pubs.html>
>>
>>I also know that there is a student in France that has made a lot of
>>progress
>>on an O'Caml binding to wxWidgets (as he contacted me a few times
>>about technical issues). He also used the wxEiffel C wrapper (that
>>    
>>
>wxHaskell
>  
>
>>uses)
>>
>>Personally, I am very impressed with wxWidgets: wxHaskell works
>>very well across the main platforms (MacosX, Windows, and GTK)
>>and is quite stable. It is also nice that wxWidgets uses native controls
>>on each platform, giving an application native look-and-feel.
>>
>>A particularly pragmatic route to implementing a wxWidgets binding
>>to wxHaskell would adapt the wxDirect program of wxHaskell to generate
>>O'Caml bindings and just copy the wxHaskell model -- it would fit O'Caml
>>quite well, especially when OCaml objects are used to model the C++
>>    
>>
>classes.
>  
>
>>Anyway, I hope this helps,
>>All the best,
>> Daan Leijen.
>>
>>[ps. I probably won't  respond to this thread anymore as I am going to
>>ICFP.]
>>
>>-------------------
>>To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives:
>>    
>>
>http://caml.inria.fr
>  
>
>>Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ:
>>    
>>
>http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/
>  
>
>>Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>>
>>
>>    
>>
>
>-------------------
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>  
>


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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[Jean-Marc EBER]

Hi all,

The name of the student is François-Xavier Houard.
He is a student of Emmanuel Chailloux.
His email address is : fxhouard@free.fr

Hi worked on a wxWidgets-ocaml binding for a few months. He continued this work 
as a summer job during July and August at LexiFi in Paris.

Unfortunately, he didn't have enough time to finish this indeed very interesting 
work.

I'm sure he will be happy to share his experience and code with anybody 
interested. I let him step in (be patient, he's now supposed to be in a 
university lecture and can only read this list later)...

Jean-Marc Eber



Daan Leijen wrote:

> SooHyoung Oh wrote:
> 
>>I've followed wxHaskell method and implemented some of widgets
>>with Ocaml.
>>Implementing all of widgets of wxEiffel C wrapper requires much time,
>>so I'm finding more systematic method.
>>
>>Can you give me more hints about your comments about
>>how to generate Ocaml binding using wxDirect?
>>  
>>
> Well,  I think I would rewrite wxDirect -- it is not that much work to 
> do this
> for OCaml  (maybe 3 days?).  Anyway, wxDirect takes a C header file that
> contains *all* wxWidgets wrapper declarations and creates Haskell signatures
> from them. As described in the paper, the C header file is somewhat special
> as it contains a lot of extra type information (in the form of macros) 
> that you
> need to generate a proper marshaller. The C header is thus a poor-mans IDL.
> 
> We can get away with this, as the number of types and marshalling 
> required is
> really simple for wxWidges, it is basically integers and pointers to 
> objects: no
> structures, arrays, general pointers, or nested types.
> 
> Anyway, I would also advice you to contact the student I mentioned in my
> previous mail -- unfortunately I forgot his name (Francois ?)  I think 
> he is a
> student of Didier Remy? (or at least another well-known French computer 
> scientist).
> Anyhow, he made a lot of progress with a wxOCaml binding and from his 
> mails I
> got the impression that he did a thorough job. I think it can save a lot 
> of work to start
> from his library.
> 
> All the best,
>   Daan Leijen.
> 
> 
>>Thanks.
>>
>>----- Original Message ----- 
>>From: "Daan Leijen" <daan@cs.uu.nl>
>>To: "Caml Mailing List" <caml-list@inria.fr>
>>Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 7:00 AM
>>Subject: Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?
>>
>>
>>  
>>
>>>Hi all,
>>>
>>>I have created a binding from Haskell to wxWidgets, called wxHaskell.
>>>You can find more information (and nice screenshots) at
>>><wxhaskell.sourceforge.net>
>>>There is also a paper about it at <www.cs.uu.nl/~daan/pubs.html>
>>>
>>>I also know that there is a student in France that has made a lot of
>>>progress
>>>on an O'Caml binding to wxWidgets (as he contacted me a few times
>>>about technical issues). He also used the wxEiffel C wrapper (that
>>>    
>>>
>>wxHaskell
>>  
>>
>>>uses)
>>>
>>>Personally, I am very impressed with wxWidgets: wxHaskell works
>>>very well across the main platforms (MacosX, Windows, and GTK)
>>>and is quite stable. It is also nice that wxWidgets uses native controls
>>>on each platform, giving an application native look-and-feel.
>>>
>>>A particularly pragmatic route to implementing a wxWidgets binding
>>>to wxHaskell would adapt the wxDirect program of wxHaskell to generate
>>>O'Caml bindings and just copy the wxHaskell model -- it would fit O'Caml
>>>quite well, especially when OCaml objects are used to model the C++
>>>    
>>>
>>classes.
>>  
>>
>>>Anyway, I hope this helps,
>>>All the best,
>>> Daan Leijen.
>>>
>>>[ps. I probably won't  respond to this thread anymore as I am going to
>>>ICFP.]
>>>
>>>-------------------
>>>To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives:
>>>    
>>>
>>http://caml.inria.fr
>>  
>>
>>>Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ:
>>>    
>>>
>>http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/
>>  
>>
>>>Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>>>
>>>
>>>    
>>>
>>
>>-------------------
>>To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr
>>Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/
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>>
>>
>>  
>>
> 

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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[François-Xavier HOUARD]

> Hi all,
> 
> I have created a binding from Haskell to wxWidgets, called wxHaskell.
> You can find more information (and nice screenshots) at 
> <wxhaskell.sourceforge.net>
> There is also a paper about it at <www.cs.uu.nl/~daan/pubs.html>
> 
> I also know that there is a student in France that has made a lot of 
> progress
> on an O'Caml binding to wxWidgets (as he contacted me a few times
> about technical issues). He also used the wxEiffel C wrapper (that wxHaskell
> uses)

I'm the french student having worked on it. The reason why I haven't
made any official release is that it doesn't work at all; I couldn't
solve memory issues. 
I'm working on a little "developper documentation" on my spare time, but
I have got fewer and fewer spare time, so... And what i've done for the
moment is in french... 

Whatever, what I can say you is that i've made a caml tool equivalent to
"wxDirect", which parses C header, and generate a typed Caml binding to
wxWidget. Even if the source of this tool is very awful (i couldn't find
time to clean it), it works quiet well, as the binding works -at least
on the few examples inspired from wxhaskell's one that i've tried-, and
as the typing scheme seems fine. I also tried to find solution to make a
nice integration of this binding to Ocaml, including garbage collection,
which doesn't work at all.

I think i will release something -a developper release- when the
developper documentation is ready, but i can't say you when: as I said
upper, i have very very few time to spend on it.

Whatever, feel free to ask me for more information, i will try to help
anybody asking...

Good night...


François-Xavier Houard
IdeFX@Iname.com

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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[chris.danx]

Richard Jones wrote:
 > On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 10:29:09PM +0100, chris.danx wrote:

[snip]

> Because we didn't want to put in the effort to do a native WxWindows
> port, and the Perl/Python options would have been too slow and clunky.

Sorry, I meant how did you find Gtk+ on Windows?  Was Gtk-Wimp 
successful at presenting a Windows style interface?  I have only used 
gtk-wimp in the context of a code editor, gps - for Ada development, it 
seemed much closer to the Windows L&F but IIRC it wasn't entirely there. 
  This was a while ago though.


>>Thankfully it's a Tetris clone.  No dialogs required. :)
> 
> That could be a problem.  Check that WxWindows supports a sufficiently
> advanced canvas.  It didn't when we were looking at it - we needed the
> complex canvas support in Gtk for the real-time updating graphs we
> were producing.

WxWidgets supports OpenGL now, so if there was a binding that would be 
an option.


Chris

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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[Richard Jones]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1944 bytes --]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2004 at 12:58:36AM +0100, chris.danx wrote:
> Richard Jones wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 10:29:09PM +0100, chris.danx wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> >Because we didn't want to put in the effort to do a native WxWindows
> >port, and the Perl/Python options would have been too slow and clunky.
> 
> Sorry, I meant how did you find Gtk+ on Windows?  Was Gtk-Wimp 
> successful at presenting a Windows style interface?  I have only used 
> gtk-wimp in the context of a code editor, gps - for Ada development, it 
> seemed much closer to the Windows L&F but IIRC it wasn't entirely there. 

Yes, basically my impression too.  For the application we were
developing - a custom application - it didn't much matter that the L&F
was very slightly different from a native Windows app.  The main thing
was that it worked at all, and we could develop on Linux without
having to deal with the horrible Windows development environment too
much.

On the other hand, if you were developing a commercial off-the-shelf
package, native widgets would certainly be the way to go
(particularly, I suspect, for high quality internationalisation).

The lack of printing support in Gtk was particularly painful.  I had
to implement a Win32 printing helper program in C, adapted from the
one supplied with GIMP (I can supply source to this if you want, but
it only deals with simple bitmaps).  Win32 is a nasty API to have to
use ...

Anyway, I have some other bits and pieces I can send you: the
cross-platform GNU Makefile we used to build the final package, and
the NSIS installer script, if these are useful.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://www.j-london.com/
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - improving website return on investment
NET::FTPSERVER is a full-featured, secure, configurable, database-backed
FTP server written in Perl: http://www.annexia.org/freeware/netftpserver/

[-- Attachment #2: Digital signature --]
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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[Olivier Andrieu]

 > "chris.danx" [Thu, 16 Sep 2004]:
 > Richard Jones wrote:
 > > On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 09:08:48PM +0100, chris.danx wrote:
 > > 
 > >>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.
 > 
 > How was that?  Choosing WxWidgets instead of Gtk+ was an option I was 
 > evaluating (not keen on using gtk+ at all really, it's my least 
 > favourite gui toolkit).  I might stick with Gtk+ though!  It's not like 
 > it's a commercial application, 

GTK+ is perfectly fine for commercial applications, it's licensed
under the LGPL.

-- 
   Olivier

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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[chris.danx]

Olivier Andrieu wrote:
>  > "chris.danx" [Thu, 16 Sep 2004]:

>  > How was that?  Choosing WxWidgets instead of Gtk+ was an option I was 
>  > evaluating (not keen on using gtk+ at all really, it's my least 
>  > favourite gui toolkit).  I might stick with Gtk+ though!  It's not like 
>  > it's a commercial application, 
> 
> GTK+ is perfectly fine for commercial applications, it's licensed
> under the LGPL.

That wasn't the problem.  The problem is L&F.

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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[skaller]

On Fri, 2004-09-17 at 23:11, chris.danx wrote:
>  
> > GTK+ is perfectly fine for commercial applications, it's licensed
> > under the LGPL.
> 
> That wasn't the problem.  The problem is L&F.

Which means 'look and feel' :)

LGPL isn't fine if you statically link OR #include
any GTK headers. That makes your binary a derived
work. It says so in the LGPL licence. So your
*source* may not be LGPL, but the resultant 
program is.

Then this clause applies, and it is anything but
what is required for a commercial situation,
where typically 'totally unencumbered' is the only
viable position:


  6. As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or
link a "work that uses the Library" with the Library to produce a
work containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work
under terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit
modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse
engineering for debugging such modifications.
                                                                                
  You must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the
Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by
this License.  You must supply a copy of this License.  If the work
during execution displays copyright notices, you must include the
copyright notice for the Library among them, as well as a reference
directing the user to the copy of this License.  Also, you must do one
of these things:

[....]

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net



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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[Brian Hurt]

On 17 Sep 2004, skaller wrote:

> LGPL isn't fine if you statically link OR #include
> any GTK headers. That makes your binary a derived
> work. It says so in the LGPL licence. So your
> *source* may not be LGPL, but the resultant 
> program is.

Are you a lawyer?

If the answer is "no", it's customary to put IANAL in front of rants like 
this.  

If the answer is "yes", please tell me what state bar or bars you have 
passed, and give me the relevent case law.

Or simply shut the fuck up.  Even I'm getting tired of the off-topic, 
anti-GPL rants.

-- 
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive,
difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of
mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
                                - Gene Spafford 
Brian

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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[Benedikt Grundmann]

Hi,

The wxEiffel project did a C wrapper of wxWidgets which is also used
by the wxHaskell project.  Using these wrappers could propably save
you a lot of time.

Cheers,

Bene

On Thursday 16 September 2004 22:25, Richard Jones wrote:
RJ> On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 09:08:48PM +0100, chris.danx wrote:
RJ> > Has anyone made such a binding?  If not I was thinking about using swig 
RJ> > and the wxpython interfaces as the starting point for a wxwidgets 
RJ> > binding for ocaml.  Has anyone tried to do this in the past?  Any 
RJ> > thoughts on the issue?
RJ> (2) There seem to be three decent approaches to using WxWidgets under
RJ> OCaml: Python, Perl or native.  Native is going to be the best, but is
RJ> going to take a heck of a lot of effort.
RJ> 
RJ> (3) Python or Perl: it's easiest just to use PyCaml or Perl4Caml to
RJ> interface with the Wx* libraries under those languages.  I don't see
RJ> why you'd want to go through SWIG for this.
RJ> 
RJ> (4) Native: definitely the best performance and the cleanest approach,
RJ> however it's lots of work.  (Now of course if you wanted to *hire*
RJ> Merjis to do the work, contact me off-list ... :-)

-- 
Benedikt Grundmann

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things 
to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
--- (Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites) ---

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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[Micha]

Am Thursday 16 September 2004 22:08 schrieb chris.danx:
> 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 have started some time ago with this and interfaced a few classes of 
wxwidgets, just to see how it works. I implemented (parts of) the 
application , window and menu classes and parts of the event system ( you can 
use 'connect' to connect ocaml functions to menus events);  So the basic way 
was ok. I just wanted to do something different ;-)

I don't like the swig way so I didn't use it, but it's a pain to go c++ -> c 
-> ocaml, massive typing :-), maybe c++ -> c -> ocamlidl would be better...

cheers
 Michael



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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?

[Basile STARYNKEVITCH]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain; charset=unknown-8bit, Size: 2001 bytes --]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 09:08:48PM +0100, chris.danx wrote:

> 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 is also the FOX toolkit www.fox-toolkit.org which claims also to be
both on Unix & Windows. It is a nice (cross-platform) GUI toolkit (in C++)
also (but there is no Ocaml binding to it).


> 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?

If there is a Python binding to it already, you might also consider coding a
WXwidget "server" by coding (in C) the few hooks to make a program using
WxWidgets which listen on a pipe (or whatever the Windows equivalent is) for
Python instructions, and sending back (to your application) some textual
protocol. I already coded this in GUIS (see
http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/guisdoc.html for more) for GTK2 (and you can
borrow some code if you like).

IMHO, the costly coding is to interface all the WXWidget API. If it has been
done once (for Python) you might try reusing it - either with Swig (for
Ocaml) or by pluggin a python interpreter. The GUI could even (as GUIS
suggest) run in a different process than your Ocaml application.


NB: I've got no knowledge on Windows, and no significant experience with
Swig or WxWidgets. So take all above with several grains of salt.

--
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ 
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net 
aliases: basile<at>tunes<dot>org = bstarynk<at>nerim<dot>net
8, rue de la Faïencerie, 92340 Bourg La Reine, France

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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets? - wxcaml

[SooHyoung Oh]

(This is the second post.
Ocaml mailing list seems to be something wrong.)

I tried to implement Ocaml binding for wxWidgets
a few months ago which followed the same method as wxHaskell
(http://wxhaskell.sourceforge.net/).

Anyone who has interest in this job can find some comments and tar ball
at http://pllab.kaist.ac.kr/~shoh/ocaml/wxcaml/doc/index.html.

There is an example program which uses frame, menubar, menu, statusbar
widgets.

Current Status:
I used "ocamlidl" to generat types and functions for ocaml
which was done without any problem.
And then I tried to implement "wxcaml" as object-oriented style like LablGtk
but it required too much time.
Any comments?

Good luck.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "chris.danx" <chris.danx@ntlworld.com>
To: "Caml Mailing List" <caml-list@inria.fr>
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 5:08 AM
Subject: [Caml-list] WxWidgets?


> 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?
>
>
> Cheers,
> Chris
>
> -------------------
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Re: [Caml-list] WxWidgets? - wxcaml

[Zeno]

Does this suppress the console window?  (I understand OCaml pops up a
console window in MSWindoze).

Thank you,
   -- Zeno

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 10:02:38 +0900, you wrote:

>I tried to implement Ocaml binding for wxWidgets
>a few months ago which followed the same method as wxHaskell
>(http://wxhaskell.sourceforge.net/).
>
>Anyone who has interest in this job can find some comments and tar ball
>at http://pllab.kaist.ac.kr/~shoh/ocaml/wxcaml/doc/index.html.
>
>There is an example program which uses frame, menubar, menu, statusbar
>widgets.
>
>Current Status:
>I used "ocamlidl" to generat types and functions for ocaml
>which was done without any problem.
>And then I tried to implement "wxcaml" as object-oriented style like LablGtk
>but it required too much time.
>Any comments?
>
>Good luck.

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