+-------------------------------------------------------+ | ANNOUNCEMENT: HToolkit 1.0 released | +-------------------------------------------------------+ | author: Krasimir Angelov | | www : http://htoolkit.sourceforge.net | | forum : mailto://htoolkit-users@lists.sourceforge.net | +-------------------------------------------------------+ The HToolkit is a package primary intended for development and designing of platform independent graphical user interface. The package gives you an abstract API for many platforms while for each platform are used only libraries which are native for the platform. This release supports only Windows and Linux platforms, but the chosen model allows support for other platforms. Under Windows the package use only native Win32 API and under Linux are used GTK/GNOME libraries. The difference between HToolkit and most of other libraries is that the latter uses only controls and dialog elements which are native under target plaform. The advantage of this is that the application looks like more native. Similar model is chosen from wxWindows for C++ and SWT for Java. The disadvantage of this libraries is that they are written in high level languages and this makes difficult to use them from other languages. The main part of HToolkit is written in C and the used model simplifies FFI interface between the HToolkit core and high level languages (most languages proposes only FFI to C). The current release gives only interface to Haskell. There is plan to build GUI libraries based on HToolkit core for C#, SmallTalk and Python. HToolkit for Haskell -------------------- HToolkit �� Haskell is divided in two libraries: GIO and Port. The Port library is a low level interface and it is not intended to be used for development. Port includes modules written in C and FFI for them written in Haskell. GIO is a high level API intended for application development. The HToolkit is divided in high and low level in order to allow development of experimental high level interfaces without sacrifice of low level API. For the time beings HToolkit gives all features proposed from ObjectIO with exception of ToolBar and CustomControl. Many of ObjectIO features are extened, but there are also many new features which does't exists in ObjectIO. Relatively all controls supported from wxHaskell are supported from HToolkit. Still missing controls like Panel, Gauge and Notebook but they are planned for the next release of HToolkit. Currently the HToolkit is the only package for Haskell which allows to create, load, edit and save images at runtime. Another interesting feature is that the toolkit allows to display icons in menu items. The feature is native under GTK/GNOME but is hard to implement under Windows. NOTE: The ToolBar support is included in the package but still doesn't work. This is because under Windows it still requires a bit of development while under GTK/GNOME the package uses the new API for GtkToolbar which will be part of the next GTK release. Krasimir Angelov __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com