Re: Feeding the OCaml GUI troll (was: Re: [Caml-list] Does LablTk have a future?)

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Wednesday 31 August 2005 09:48, David MENTRE wrote:
> Well, in option (1), as somebody else underlined it, it is a lot more
> than just skinning. How do you handle i18n and l10n issues? How to
> display bidirectionnal languages? How to write Arabic, Hebrew or
> Chinese characters? How to take input in Japanese or Tamil? How to
> handle copy/paste and drag & drop with other applications of the
> platform? Or to print PDF with Arabic and Indian characters in the
> same document?

Those features would require a substantial amount of work for either (1) or 
(2), AFAIK.

> Maybe you don't have those issues for you local market, Jon. But as
> soon as you are writting graphical applications to be used worldwide,
> those issues are coming out pretty quickly. This is at least a
> requirement for my application.

Then your requirements are quite different from my own and, I believe, many 
other people's. To start with, I am just interested in a minimal working 
library that would let me knock up simple applications. Cross-platform drag 
and drop is way down the line...

> I really fear your under estimate the amount of work needed to
> accomplish such a job. And the OCaml community seems pretty fragmented
> on this GUI front.

If you're talking about supporting all languages and all features on all 
platforms then of course it is an enormous undertaking. From my point of 
view, that is such a difficult task that it simply isn't worth discussing. I 
believe we can only do a decent job if we attack a small problem.

> ...
>  3. (Jon option) write a pure GUI from scratch, in pure OCaml. A
> project similar to Qt or WxWidgets for C++. It seems doable to have a
> basic GUI but handling all i18n and desktop interoperability issues
> seems pretty complicated;

If you're talking about my option (2) then it is more like GLUI and not like 
Qt and wxWindows.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
Objective CAML for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists