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ocplib-wxOCaml

A binding to wxWidgets

Dependencies

  • OCaml: 'ocp-build' (from GitHub)
  • External: WxWidgets 2.8 or 2.9 compiled with --enable-graphics-context

Current Status

  • Beta version
  • See examples in samples/

Author

  • Fabrice Le Fessant (INRIA/OCamlPro)

How to compile

./configure
make

To run examples:

$ cd samples $ for sample in *; do ../_obuild/$sample/$sample.asm; done

How to use

  • Look at the code of examples in samples/:

    • "minimal" is the most simple application
    • "two_panels" shows buttons and labels widgets
    • "calendar" shows the calendar widgets
    • "drawing" shows how to draw on widgets
    • "wrapsizer" shows toolbox and options widgetds

  • The global architectures of modules (in wxWidgets/) is:

    • a module WxClasses with all the (abstract) types
    • a module WxWidgets with the constructors (useful to open)
    • a module WxDefs with the constants (useful to open too)
    • a module per class, with all the methods (including inherited ones)
    • a module WxMisc with misc functions
    • a function wxMain with the main loop

How is it done ?

This project is a complete rewritting of wxOCaml, that does not contain any code from wxHaskell or wxEiffel anymore. It uses a specification of wxWidget API, given in the api/ directory, and generates all the C++ stubs and OCaml modules from that specification, using two specific generators, wxDefsGen (constants in WxDefs, from api/wxDefs.dsc) and wxStubsGen (stubs from api/*.api and events from api/events.dsc).

Since the API language is very close to C++ prototypes, it is easy to add new bindings for missing classes, functions and methods. Check the files in api/ for examples.

How to use ?

Start your code with:

 open WxDefs
 open WxClasses
 open WxWidgets

The "main" of your code is a function "onInit" called from the WxWidgets loop:

 let onInit _ = ...
 let _ = wxMain oninit

For every class of WxWidget, we define a module with the same name. The "new" constructor is called "create". There can be several "create*" functions corresponding to several constructors with different arguments.

Methods are functions in the class module, taking the object as first argument. If a method is overloaded for different arguments, then several functions can correspond to the different kinds of arguments: For example

 m_sizer->add(m_button)

will be translated into

 WxSizer.addWindow m_size m_button

For every class, there are cast functions to translate an object to any of its ancestor types. For example, you might need to use:

 WxSizer.addWindow (WxBoxSizer.wxSizer m_size) (WxButton.wxWindow m_button)

Since methods from ancestors are redefined in children modules, this example can be simplified to:

 WxBoxSizer.addWindow m_size (WxButton.wxWindow m_button)

The WxWidgets module defines some useful helper functions that can be used to make the code less verbose. In particular, it defines a WxSizerFlags module that can be used to translate WxSizerFlags classes.

TODO

  • Translate more examples from WxWidgets
  • Bind more classes !
  • Bind more methods per class !
  • Generate OCaml stubs to call superclass methods (useful when overloading virtual methods from OCaml)