Re: [open-cobol-list] GUI -- wxWidgets?

[Ulf Dambacher]

Brian Tiffin schrieb:
> Hello everyone
> 
> With the recent addition of libguile linkage How-To, GTK+ can also be 
> accessed 
> from the Scheme layer.  Anything on the Perl side can be accessed through the 
> cob_perl side, so wxWidgets is definitely a viable option already.  I'm still 
> working with Rildo's codebase to get smooth integration with Tcl/Tk 
> (currently functional and samples have been posted), but I'd like to spend my 
> whimsical time and attention on the GTK bindings.  There are a bag load of 
> features that Glib, GDK and GTK open up.  One next step may be peeling back 
> access to the GtkBuilder feature for XML UI design for those so inclined.

Hi together

I have some experience with  tk, gtk, qt and the old athena widgets and even did
my own widget set for (and natively coded in) gnu smalltalk.
For c programming and embedding in other languages I definitely recommend gtk+.
Also if you are concerned with windows/unix portability and licenses, gtk+ works
for you.

For "the old cobol coders" I think it's the best to provide folowing:
- A main window with text canvas, menubar and status line, both can be accessed
and modified via special accept/display additions, the normal display/accept
output goes to to the text canvas (maybe using a fixed font, but user
configurable lines/cols other than 80x24 chars).
This way  every cobol program gets a small X11-gui without code changes and this
could be an adaption of the current curses code to x11.

- a way to load these xml ui design files to fire up the dialogs and return the
result to a record in working storage area or by doing calls to get them.

- everything should work just with the gui builder without the need of further
linking and additional non-cobol sources.

I think 80% of the cobol users will be happy with this and its possible to code
this glue layer in short time.
And if nobody does it, I will start this. But I am currently commited in porting
my codebase to OC so It will be April until then.

/ulf