What library can I use to implement the following kind of functionality
on Linux:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65774455#N08/5983551492/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65774455#N08/5983551494/in/photostream/
My goal is a locally installed app so stuff like JQuery is out of the question.
Preferred languages are C, Perl. But it doesn't have to be strictly confined to those 2 languages.
Any hints to which part of the library I should look at will be deeply appreciated.
Thanks!
In case your question is still up to date:
You could take a look at QT, which is a very good gui framework (KDE is built on top of QT) http://qt.nokia.com/. It really has tons of features and stuff, and you can of course build GUIs that support drag & drop. The framework is in C++ though.
The GTK framework (base of the gnome desktop environment) has C as well as C++ libs (http://www.gtk.org/).
Of course there are other gui libraries and frameworks for linux (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_widget_toolkits), I for one, would always choose QT over any other framework, because the API and documentation is really great.
Related
I am surveying a cross-platform tool, and seems codenameone is a good choice for build an APP with WORA feature.
And I know codenameone have high extension capability to create extensions by add cn1lib format interfaces to translate many other language libraries to be interact with codenameone. (Is this statement true?)
But if I am developing a SDK which have UI components, how do I export this library to other mainstream languages such as C#, Objective-C, Swift, Java on Android, C++, C, JavaScript, ...... I know I of course have to create interfaces to bridge different language. How do I export SDK built by codenameone to work like that?
Thanks your kindly help.
No. Codename One is designed to build complete apps. Libraries/SDK's for native projects are a different beast and they require native code.
I don't like saying "never" but this is probably not something that we would be able to address. Codename One has features such as GC (Garbage Collection) which wouldn't play nicely with a native app if it was packaged as an SDK.
The only cross platform tool that's designed for building SDK's (that I am aware of) is J2ObjC which is designed for sharing common Java library code between iOS & Android. I haven't used it much so I can't really say much about it.
The below link shows examples on how the Windows API works:
Module 1. Your First Windows Program
I am quite interested in how the Mac API looks like.
After doing some reading, I read a lot of things like XCode (Environment), Cocoa Framework, etc. However, I dont see any information about something like the Win32 API.
Doesn't Apple have a low level C API that is not based on Obective-C but just plain old C?
Your link points to a tutorial for the GUI components of Windows. In that case, the equivalent for OS X is indeed the Cocoa framework, which consists of the Foundation and AppKit libraries, which are Objective-C libraries.
Cocoa's control drawing is entirely local to the application. Therefore, the only way to build applications using controls is with Objective-C. Nothing stops you from building a C API on top of that; similar tactics have been used to build libraries like Qt or bindings to languages like Python and Ruby.
There is no plain C GUI API in OS X. There are low-level APIs (part of the Quartz graphics framework, aka the Core Graphics API) for dealing with the window manager to open the top-level windows, but these are either very complicated or completely undocumented. And even then, you'd be responsible for doing all the controls and input handling yourself. Update Some of the basic facilities that applications build on top of are also available through C APIs, namely Core Foundation, Core Graphics, Core Text, and Grand Central Dispatch. But these are still not enough to use Cocoa; Cocoa is just built on top of them.
There is also the Carbon API, which is a C API, but was intended for transitioning pre-OS X applications to OS X and is thus not suitable for new application development. In fact, I'm not even sure it is even supported anymore.
So you have two options if you want to write a GUI program for OS X in plain C:
find a wrapper library
give up and learn Objective-C, which sits on top of plain C anyway
If online tutorials, including Apple's official ones, don't suit you, the Big Nerd Ranch books on Cocoa development are good. Note that their beginner-oriented books are transitioning to the Swift language, but they have a separate book dedicated to teaching Objective-C as well.
You'll also need to know that OS X applications almost exclusively design their user interfaces using a graphical designer called Interface Builder, akin to the form designers in Visual Studio. With the Windows API, you can still get away with doing things by code, and a lot of people do so; with OS X, doing everything programmatically is difficult (but still possible).
Okay, I'd like to write a simple C app for Linux (say Ubuntu with Gnome) that would do the following:
Open a Window
Draw something in that window using a main loop, e.g. the current loop number. I don't want to use controls, but to draw directly on the window surface
Close the window & the app
I can do that in Windows, but I've no idea how I could do that in Linux.
Thanks!
Unless you want a full-blown GUI (in which case I'd recommend Qt or GTK), then SDL is a very popular and extremely simple free cross-platform library that gives you a drawing surface and some simple IO facilities. It's natively C, but has bindings to a large number of other languages.
There are various "Hello World" examples for X11 programming.
Using GTK+:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk-tutorial/2.13/c39.html
Using Qt:
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/tutorials-widgets-toplevel.html
Using wxWidgets:
http://www.wxwidgets.org/docs/tutorials/hello.htm
There are a lot more toolkits: Fox, FLTK, Tk, EFL ...
So far these have all been cross-platform, so let's have a look at X11-specific exampls:
This is using Xlib:
http://en.literateprograms.org/Special:Downloadcode/Hello_World_(C,_Xlib)
And this is using Xcb:
http://xcb.freedesktop.org/tutorial/basicwindowsanddrawing/
If you only want to draw something, why not just use OpenGL and GLUT. The latter provides simple methods to create a window with an OpenGL context.
Setting up a GLUT application is very straighforward and there are lots of tutorials out there , e.g. Lighthouse3d.com. This tutorial works with visual studio, but it's not hard to translate this to compiling an application on Linux.
Alternatively, you could also work with Qt, which is a more advanced and easy to use GUI toolkit, and which would not necessarily require you to write OpenGL code.
Since you mentioned C, there is Glade if you want to make use of GTK+ for a nice little editor that allows you to draw controls onto a window.
Alternatively if you have access to a C++ compiler you can have a look at Qt which provides similar functionality.
Well, if you're familiar with making gui apps in windows I'm going to take a guess that you've done it with .net or something similar. An easy transition would be to use mono. A cross platform .NET development platform - http://mono-project.com/Main_Page
There's also has a variety gui toolkits to use: http://www.mono-project.com/Gui_Toolkits
If you want to draw directly onto the window, have you considered X11?
It's not going to be as nice as working with a toolkit like GTK or Qt, but it's about as low level as you can get in the windowing system.
I don't have any experience with programming straight X11, so I can't recommend any starting material.
I've been tasked with porting an existing Windows GUI app to Linux. Ideally, I'd like to do this so the same code base can be used to build either the Windows version or the Linux version. I'll be doing my work on Ubuntu 9.04. After searching around, it's unclear to me what tools are best suited to help me with this.
A list of loose requirements would be:
The code is in C, not C++, and should compile to build both Windows and Linux versions. Since it's existing code, and fairly large, converting to a managed language like .NET is out of the question for now.
I would prefer if I can use the same dialogs in both systems. In Windows, putting up a dialog is pretty simple. You build the dialog in the Resource Editor in Visual Studio, then call DialogBox() API, and handle the event messages. I would really like to find something that can do the equivalent on the Linux side.
It would also be nice to have a good IDE similar to Visual Studio.
Any helps or hints would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Winelib should let you compile Win32 code under Linux with only a few modifications.
Since your code base is in C, I'd suggest using GTK+. It's a cross platform GUI toolkit. For instance, Pidgin instant messenger GUI is created with GTK+. Glade user interface designer can be used to graphically design UIs.
If you're on a tight budget, and don't mind taking time to work around a fair number of limitations, Winlib is an option. If you're shorter on time, and have a larger budget, you might want to look into Mainsoft instead. It's not exactly perfect, but I believe it supports a considerably larger part of the Win32 API (at a correspondingly higher price).
Until now I've been only writing console applications but I need to write a simple window application for a school assignment.
Could somebody point me to a good tutorial how to create windows and other ordinary windows elements such as buttons, 2d graphs etc in ANSI C? is there some good library I should use?
I tried googling but there are no tutorial websites devoted to C.
If you can, I would also appreciate some example code.
Thank you.
By the way, I use Dec C++.
GTK is a good library to use, but may provide non-native looks under Windows. It looks great under GNU/Linux, especially using GNOME.
It is implemented in just C (Using the GObject Type System, part of the GLib library), so it will work great for your needs. There is also a RAD tool called Glade.
There's nothing in the ANSI C standard about windows. If you want to make a windowed application, you'll have to use platform-specific libraries (e.g. Win32, Cocoa, or X11), or some sort of cross-platform library that encapsulates that (e.g. SDL, wxWidgets, or many more).
Common places to start are Charles Petzold's Programming Windows and theForger's Win32 API Programming Tutorial.
However in most cases C is no longer the preferred language for Windows development. Object oriented technology is far better suited to GUI development, and with the introduction of MFC, C++ became the preferred language, and later with .Net, C# and C++/CLI.
The Win32 API can be hard work, much of MFC is little better than a Win32 API wrapper, the .Net framework however was designed from the ground up, and is less encumbered by the legacy of the Win32 API monster, and working with it tends to result in far greater productivity.
Either way, Dev-C++ is not a great tool for GUI development.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/829488 which also talks how to create
Windows application: Creates a simple
Microsoft Windows-based application.
The application files include a
ProjectName.cpp file that contains a
_tWinMain function. You can use this type of application to perform
graphical user interface (GUI) based
programming.
As for tutorials... use MSDN. Win32 API is C. You don't need "Win32 ANSI C tutorial" - you need Win32 tutorial (for example http://www.winprog.org/tutorial/start.html, http://www.functionx.com/win32/Lesson01.htm) - unless, of course, you don't know ANSI C but then you just look for ANSI C tutorial. These subjects are independent.
There are lots of good libraries—too many for there to be an obvious choice without starting a religious war. I recommend that for your first library you learn something that will work on Windows, Linux, or OSX. Here are two good choices, not necessarily the best, but widely used and personal favorites:
Tcl/Tk. You write most of your application in the Tcl scripting language, but you can easily integrate your own ANSI C code into Tcl, which was designed from the beginning with such integration in mind. The Tk toolkit is very easy to learn, and you can write many simple GUIs in pure Tcl when you are getting started. Interactive, easy, and very well supported.
If you want to write everything in ANSI C, I don't know of any really simple choices, but I've been fairly happy with wxwidgets. All these tools have a pretty steep learning curve, however.
There are not many plain C GUI libraries as the strengths of the language lie elsewhere. Perhaps you should think about using a language with C bindings so you can still do the number crunching in C, but use something less painful for GUI development?
If you really want to stick to C, you can either use the OS' native API or the only current cross-platform C GUI lib I'm aware of: GTK+. If you don't really need a GUI but just graphical output, I'd go with SDL.
I suggest you download Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition and use C#.Net.
As has been said, I suggest you use Winforms and switch to a .Net environment. It's 2009, and I think there are more suitable solutions to GUI's :P
Edit: Nvm, didn't see it was a school assignment.
However, here is a C++ guide on the Win32 API: http://www.relisoft.com/win32/index.htm