Could someone make a list of FreeBASIC GUI libraries/frameworks?

[Munair]

I don't think FPC is any independent from Lazarus. FPC now is only being developed to full fill the needs of Lazarus but not the other way around.

Exactly, so FPC today may not be what FB should try to become. That's the point I was trying to make. If FB would expand its features to incorporate full class support, it would not only benefit GUI development but other projects as well. Those features would boost the interest in FB as a whole. An advanced GUI project would be just one logical result and FB would still be independent. They already started to incorporate objects several years ago. Why did they do that if not as a general extension of the language?

[TJF]

But I myself if I have to the skills to do so I would do an OOP wrapping for GTK+ the way GTKMM does. This way FreeBASIC will be more widely adopted by the GNOME/GTK+ community and it's even possible for a FreeBASIC based applications to be included by default by a GTK+ based desktop environment.

girtobac is prepared to auto-generate OOP bindings for GTK+ (and all other GIR-libraries). But this feature isn't active yet, since the FB syntax doesn't support extending multiple UDTs at once, like

Code: Select all

TYPE NewClass EXTENDS Member1, Member2, Member3

And I don't want to implement a workaround.

[marcov]

Yes, I misunderstood you. You want to use these gui toolkit as a backend for our own cross platform gui toolkit. I'm talking about full binding. They're different. It sounded more and more like the LCL. Do you want FB to go the same way as FPC to develop a RAD environment like Lazarus?

I think that is the best model. Not necessarily that the same goals will be reached, but as general direction, even for a smaller scale effort it would be good .

Contrary to what people think the RAD bit is less the pointy-click stuff, and more having a solid component class underneath.

I think we really need a good GUI designer but I don't think we need RAD.

Like what ? One could say I never saw a good GUI designer then, but that is maybe because I never looked because I was on the RAD train. The closest I got is Symantic Visual Cafe and JBuilder, which are RAD-like, but try to rescan source rather than doing it properly.

p/s: We already have gui toolkit like what you described and do not need any LCL: Window9 and MyFbFramework surely full fill your definition. On Windows they use the Win32 API as backend and on Linux they use GTK+, the same as the LCL, WXWidgets and Ultimate++.

It could be the begin. Just put a solid component and persistence model under them.

[badidea]

At this point I wonder if it wouldn't be an option to use only the Win32 Api for GUI programming - using Wine on Linux? I have absolutely no experience with Linux, what do our Linux experts here think about that option?

I am no linux expert, just a simple user. But that sounds a bit like the US having to rely on Russia to get astronauts into space.

Is there any place one can post such programs as examples for those wanting to use window9? I would be interested in posting these there if so.

'Tips and Tricks' section on this forum? One long topic with several examples. Or one topic per example and a index topic listing to the individual example topics. I have not tried window9 yet. It would interest me.

[MrSwiss]

Is there any place one can post such programs as examples for those wanting to use window9? I would be interested in posting these there if so.

'Tips and Tricks' section on this forum?

Nope, I'd strongly object because typically, examples are NOT containing either Tip's nor Trick's.
(They are just what the name 'example' implies.)
Stuff like that, is probably best placed in 'Projects' because there, anything is possible.

[badidea]

Else a GitHub page (repository) for the window9 examples?
Or a tutorial on the freebasic wiki. The problem with code on the forum is that there is no overall index and stuff gets lost quickly.

[BasicCoder2]

I downloaded window9 yesterday from here but couldn't get the examples to work without compiler errors.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/guiwindow9/

[jj2007]

At this point I wonder if it wouldn't be an option to use only the Win32 Api for GUI programming - using Wine on Linux? I have absolutely no experience with Linux, what do our Linux experts here think about that option?

I am no linux expert, just a simple user. But that sounds a bit like the US having to rely on Russia to get astronauts into space.

Excellent analogy, but rumours say this is the only cooperation between the US and Russia that really works ;-)

[badidea]

I downloaded window9 yesterday from here but couldn't get the examples to work without compiler errors.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/guiwindow9/

No luck here either. And I don't want to go through all the pages here (at the moment): https://freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=17058

Edit: I found one problem. If you click download, you get the Windows version. Via 'Files' you can find all the files.

[badidea]

At this point I wonder if it wouldn't be an option to use only the Win32 Api for GUI programming - using Wine on Linux? I have absolutely no experience with Linux, what do our Linux experts here think about that option?

I am no linux expert, just a simple user. But that sounds a bit like the US having to rely on Russia to get astronauts into space.

Excellent analogy, but rumours say this is the only cooperation between the US and Russia that really works ;-)

Yes, it works, but apparently not the ideal situation. The US is busy getting their own transport system again.

[Imortis]

I downloaded window9 yesterday from here but couldn't get the examples to work without compiler errors.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/guiwindow9/

No luck here either. And I don't want to go through all the pages here (at the moment): https://freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=17058

It looks like there are no example in the zip from sourceforge. That is why nothing will compile on it's own. I think there is some example code in the thread somewhere, I will see what I can find for you.

EDIT: Looks like all examples are in the chm help file. There are examples for every function in the sections dedicated to them.

EDIT #2: You will also need the zlib binary files compiled for win32 and win64.
I found them so you don't have to.
Once you have the zip, you can just copy the "lib" folder in it to your freeBASIC install directory. If you are using WinFBE, it will put the libraries in the correct spot for both both compilers (since it has 32 and 64bit compiler in the same folder structure. Otherwise you will need to put the win32 folder in your 32bit compiler's lib folder, and the win64 folder in your 64 bit compiler's folder.

[badidea]

I got window9 working on linux (or at least one example), but it was no simple procedure. Had set some additional symlink, and the usual installing libraries from the repo until the linker stops complaining. It did not help that I first installed the Windows version :-)

Google says: "Сообщение, Это кнопка" means "Message, This is a button".

Used code from chm-file:

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#Include "window9.bi"
Dim As Integer event
OpenWindow("1",300,10,100,100)
ButtonGadget(1,10,10,60,30,"button")
Do
   event=WaitEvent()
   If event=EventClose Then End
   If event=eventgadget Then MessBox("Сообщение","Это кнопка")
Loop

[jj2007]

It works, kind of - except for the MessBox. Does the library have issues with Utf8? The print works fine. Note also that it looks somewhat different from your Linux version.


Same with a native Windows application:

[Josep Roca]

@jj2007,

If you bother to look at the code of the Windows version, you will see that it only supports ansi.

[jj2007]

If you bother to look at the code of the Windows version, you will see that it only supports ansi.

Thanks for the info, Josep. I was just surprised that the chm example uses Russian but doesn't work with Russian on my machine. CP 1251, I suppose. That might be confusing for some n00bs, and imho opening the "what is unicode, what is utf8" box of Pandora should be done in a different context. On Linux, it seems to work because Utf8 is the default (?).