Re: [Caml-list] Kylix and OCaml

[Christophe Raffalli <Christophe.Raffalli@univ-savoie.fr>]

Vitaly Lugovsky a écrit :
> 
> On Mon, 19 Nov 2001, Christophe Raffalli wrote:
> 
> >
> > A friend of mine showed me Kylix (see Borland's home page:
> > http://www.borland.com)... It looks great to create
> > user interfaces.
> 
>  It is an illusion. Don't believe your eyes. Tools like Delphi/Kylix/...
> will not help you at all - it's much faster to write an UI in Tk by hands
> then using such a WYSIWIG.

I will not comment for Kylix ... But I was a user of the not very unfamous
SUIT. And I can tell you are wrong. SUIT was design with two ideas:
- use real number for sizes to allow scaling (that was not really a good idea)
- each widget have properties (like colors, size, fonts, etc ...)
  - widgets can be grouped to share some properties (independetly of the fact  
    they are parents)
  -  AND each kind of property is associated with a widget to 
    allow its modification (for instance a font selection dialog, or 
    scroll bar for the position of an element in a window). 
    
With that it took only a couple of minutes to write a Text processor more
complete than you may think (possible to select fonts, short cuts, etc ..)
moreover, you only had to write very few lines of code (in fact only the
line saving the buffer in a file and reading a file)

And last point: SUIT produced its output in a readable interface description 
language and translated that (to C or C++ I can not remember). So you could use
it without graphical interface if you did not like that :-)

>  But, if you want WYSIWIG GUI tool, just use Glade - it produces a
> portable XML representation for GUI dialogs, and, I belive, it'll be
> pretty easy to use it from Caml.
> 
> > So using CamlIDL, it should be easy to make Kylix use our favorite language and
> > get interfaces (portable under both Linux and Windows) in no time ?
> 
>  Why do you want such a havy and thick GUI layer? GUI is for scripts!
> Use Wish, it's portable. Much more portable, then Bugland tools.

Kylix is in fact quite responsive and light (working on powerless PCs).
If you mean heavy because the professionnal edition has numerous widget (like
every thing to write a database client or a web browser in a couple of
minutes). In fact I am quite amased with the speed for a package of 120Mo when
installed for the pro version (I think that the 120Mo are mainly the widgets
and examples). It shows that it is well implemented (other software like
star-office let you see that they are big !)

But then I agree that they may be other solutions using a language to describe
the interface. 

But what are the solutions (language or WYSIWIG) immediately available for
OCaml ?

Are they complete (how many kind of widgets supported ?)




-- 
Christophe Raffalli
Université de Savoie
Batiment Le Chablais, bureau 21
73376 Le Bourget-du-Lac Cedex

tél: (33) 4 79 75 81 03
fax: (33) 4 79 75 87 42
mail: Christophe.Raffalli@univ-savoie.fr
www: http://www.lama.univ-savoie.fr/~RAFFALLI
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