[Openmcl-devel] GUI help for Lisp in Small Parts

[Paul Krueger]

David,

There isn't anything in CCL that is exactly equivalent to the capi functionality in LispWorks. CCL has a really terrific bridge to Apple's Objective-C Cocoa environment that lets developers build interfaces in much the same way that other Apple developers would. So you get quite a bit of flexibility, but there are fewer of the directly usable sorts of things such as those you use on your "Creating Dialogue Boxes" web page. The interfaces that you use there are all relatively simple modal windows and capi-equivalent methods for those could be built by anyone with an understanding of the CCL Objective-C bridge and Cocoa. The exact implementation would depend on how much backward compatibility to previous OSX releases you want to have since Apple's Cocoa libraries have evolved quite a bit since OSX 10.6.

I would offer to create these dialog/functions for you myself, but I am currently in the final checkout stages of a new version of my own interface-building code/tutorial (aimed at building full-blown stand-alone CCL/Lisp applications with arbitrarily complex windows) and I just don't think I can take the time to do what you need right now. There is a previous version of my code/tutorial (...ccl/contrib/cocoa-ide/krueger/InterfaceProjects/...) in the current CCL release, but it is sadly out of date. It is still relevant for OSX 10.6 systems, but for newer releases it just doesn't work properly. The approach described there is also heavily dependent on the use of Apple's Interface Builder (whereas my new approach avoids that altogether). If all you need is what you show on your web page, then I would recommend avoiding any use of Interface Builder and directly implementing everything in Lisp. If you can find a volunteer who wants to take on the development of the capi-equivalent functions you need (or you want to do so yourself), I'd be willing to act as a volunteer consultant for them as long as the time needed stays fairly small. Feel free to contact me directly if you want to pursue that.

Paul

On Apr 24, 2013, at 9:38 AM, David Johnson-Davies <david at interface.co.uk> wrote:

> Can anyone help?
> 
> I'm developing a beginner's Lisp tutorial called "Lisp in Small Parts". Currently it's designed to run with LispWorks, but I want to make it work with Clozure CL too as that's more easily available to beginners; eg from the Mac App Store.
> 
> The question is - are there equivalents to the CAPI GUI commands in Clozure CL? I need to create a Clozure CL version of this page "Creating Dialogue Boxes":
> 
> http://www.plasticki.com/show?HO
> 
> I've seen references to EasyGUI, but can't find any specifications.
> 
> Thanks,
> David Johnson-Davies
> 
> +------------------------------------------------------------+
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> 
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