On Jan 13, 2:15 pm, aleph0 <apl68...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> AFAIK, most APL vendors interface to the standard Windows GUI objects.
> Is there a possibility of using "Java GUI Modules" instead ?
> i.e. Java Classes etc etc.
> ... and if so, is it possible without much effort ?
I haven't tried it myself, but I read that somewhere that MicroAPL
supports Java connectivity. Possibly IBM APL2.
> Well, a recent example :
> ... a friend of mine recently recieved his personal copy of APL and
> his very first comment was....." the GUI interface looks wrong ; is it
> (APL) installed properly?"
With some notable exceptions, such as Swing for Java, the underlying
software to build the gui comes from the operating system (Windows,
Vista, Mac, etc.) or framework (.Net), and in principle you should be
able to build components which have a family resemblance. Swing has a
distinctive look to it, and if that's what you're used to, something
else will look different.
GUI design and ergonomics is an art and science of its own, it's a
fair bit of work to build something which is both visually pleasing
and easy to work with. Dyalog and the others give you the tools to
put the various controls down on a form, but it is another matter to
arrange them well.
Dyalog and Manugistics started releasing their GUI stuff around 1992.
At the time, the alternative was to do GUI development in C, which was
comparatively dreadful and tedious. Today, some 16 years later, the
low-level details are much the same, while lots of software, possibly
of disinterest to the APLer, have emerged, such as Visual Studio,
Eclipse, Swing, and so on. These aid in the initial composition of
the interfaces, but integrating APL computation in these is not
trivial. In a sense, APL computation and the GUI need to be somehow
disconnected, but the very nature of an APL interpreter requires the
two to be too close together.
One thing I would like to look at some day soon is Mozilla, the engine
behind the Firefox browser. Evidently it is possible to build
comprehensive GUIs with .XUL files, handle callbacks, and so on.
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