Ocaml and (the lack of) RAD tools

["Georges Mariano" <georges.mariano@inrets.fr>]

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 !!! ;-)