Frank Hrebabetzky
2004-10-12 16:16:45 UTC
For quite a time I have been missing the tools for real-world programs
in Oberon. With 'real-world' I mean:
1. Result is an executable for a widely used OS
2. Has a GUI
The drawbacks of the existing systems are:
- user groups even smaller than the Oberon community as a whole, so
existence/continuity and help depend on very few people (e.g. Visual
Oberon)
- Restricted set of GUI elements and little or no development activities
in this respect (e.g. Blackbox)
So I tried to call GTK functions from an Oberon program using the ooc
compiler, and with the valuable help of Stewart Greenhill it worked
pretty well.
Some positive and negative points:
+ GTK and ooc are available for Windows and Unix
+ GTK is very complete with a huge community behind
+ ooc doesn't allow only access to GTK, but to other libraries as well
+ GUI builder available: With Glade, the GUI can be laid out
graphically. It can generate (among others) C source code which has
to be translated manually to Oberon. This is still much less work
if you do not know GTK very well.
- If it is for the first time, installation of all the packages (ooc, gc
(garbage collector), GTK, ...) will take some time. This is specially
true for Windows, where GTK installation is a little more complicated
and which requires some additional packages (mingw, msys).
- GTK is somewhat clumsy, especially if you compare it with the elegance
of 'Gadgets' (OS Oberon).
- Access of libraries means 'unsafe'. (But the modularity of Oberon lets
you cleanly separate safe from unsafe parts.)
If you are interested in my example, I can send it to you. Write to
hreba then there is an 'at', then comes
terra followed by a dot, then
com another dot and finally
br
in Oberon. With 'real-world' I mean:
1. Result is an executable for a widely used OS
2. Has a GUI
The drawbacks of the existing systems are:
- user groups even smaller than the Oberon community as a whole, so
existence/continuity and help depend on very few people (e.g. Visual
Oberon)
- Restricted set of GUI elements and little or no development activities
in this respect (e.g. Blackbox)
So I tried to call GTK functions from an Oberon program using the ooc
compiler, and with the valuable help of Stewart Greenhill it worked
pretty well.
Some positive and negative points:
+ GTK and ooc are available for Windows and Unix
+ GTK is very complete with a huge community behind
+ ooc doesn't allow only access to GTK, but to other libraries as well
+ GUI builder available: With Glade, the GUI can be laid out
graphically. It can generate (among others) C source code which has
to be translated manually to Oberon. This is still much less work
if you do not know GTK very well.
- If it is for the first time, installation of all the packages (ooc, gc
(garbage collector), GTK, ...) will take some time. This is specially
true for Windows, where GTK installation is a little more complicated
and which requires some additional packages (mingw, msys).
- GTK is somewhat clumsy, especially if you compare it with the elegance
of 'Gadgets' (OS Oberon).
- Access of libraries means 'unsafe'. (But the modularity of Oberon lets
you cleanly separate safe from unsafe parts.)
If you are interested in my example, I can send it to you. Write to
hreba then there is an 'at', then comes
terra followed by a dot, then
com another dot and finally
br