TestGUI nears initial release

Ive been making progress on my pet project TrainGUI. First off Ive renamed it TestGUI as I have done some work on it other than during my commute to/from work. Yes I know its still a pretty name - maybe someone will suggest something better?

Ive upgraded to the latest fltk-1.1.6 and FLU-2.14 libraries and ported to WIN32 as well as DSL. Compiles under Visual Studio .NET and works great with ActiveState Perl :-)

Plenty of stuff left to do, I still need to be able to allow properties changed in the GUI to affect the controls themselves, and although Im supporting the entire FLTK widget set only a few fire any events. Still I guess I can fill in things like that later once I have the skeleton in place.

Im sure some people are going to object to this 'old world inside-out' way of extending Perl by embedding the perl interpreter rather than extending perl via XSUBs, but TestGUI isnt just a perl extension - Its a GUI application builder with scripting in Perl, and I think thats different :-)

Anyway, current plan is to throw a couple of binaries onto a website and see what the feedback is like. Its early days and Im pretty flexible.

By petergunn at 2005-01-27 14:33 | petergunn's blog | login or register to post comments

Give it a whirl...

I put a tar of the debug binary & source up on the web for anyone to try out...

http://www.milanosbar.com/tg0001.tgz

mkdir testgui0001
mv tg0001.tgz testgui0001
cd testgui0001
tar xvfz tg0001.tgz

To run it type...

./a.out

Right mouse on the blank window will give a popup menu for creating controls. Only button & input controls generate useful click/enter events right now. Plan is to add the rest incrementally.

To try a simple example, create a window with a button and an input box. Select the button, select the click event on the main design window then type $input1->value("bork"); then run it. If you click the button then "bork" should apear in the text box. :-)

Lemme know what you think. Im not sure where to take the project from here.

By petergunn at Sun, 2005-01-30 18:19 | login or register to post comments

I tried it. As i understand,

I tried it.
As i understand, the a.out is a fltk-perl interpreter, it runs test.pl which is the guibuilder program?
Is it posible to have testGUI genarate "standalone" scripts, reading the test.pl i found it s posible to use: a.out -run myprg.pl?
If and how can we "use" perlmodules?
Do you know a how to disable the ESC key to close the main window?
Maybe i will like it. I hope you are not going to improve it until it becomes "Visual-Perl".

By henk1955 at Mon, 2005-01-31 10:38 | login or register to post comments

You got it :-)

The a.out binary is an fltk application that executes perl routines when events occur. Some of the non-GUI routines such as saving/loading projects or generating code are performed by supporting perl routines contained in test.pl.

You should be able to use regular perl modules that are already installed in your system. I have tried this but I dont see why it wont work. You cant use the permodules from the application because there arent any... its an application that executes perl subroutines rather than a bunch of perl extensions. It should be possible to generate code that could use such extensions if they were available, or even for other languages (i.e. fltk-lua) but Im not thinking of heading much in that direction right now.

a.out -run myprog.pl will run your myprog.pl code file. At some point I'll try and get #! scripts to work as well.

> Do you know a how to disable the ESC key to close the main window?

I'll try and fix that soon. I didnt even know it did that :-)

This sort of feedback is very useful. Im still wondering if I should set up a project page and if Source Forge is the best place, or indeed if its worth extending the app past my own requirements.

By petergunn at Mon, 2005-01-31 14:06 | login or register to post comments

DSL Talk