wanna create a gui for an app

im_ka · 2004-03-09 15:06:21

greetz!

i wanna create a little gui for a commandline app. never done this before. does any1 know about some howto's online? i don't know much about these things at the moment, but i gotta start somewhere, and i'm not afraid to read and spend some time. things that cross my mind when thinking about creating a gui are python, c, gtk,...

any help, advice, links are very welcome!

thanks in advance!

sarah31 · 2004-03-09 16:07:31

there is a ncurses howto online somewhere .... but unlike me many folks wouldn't consider ncurses much of a gui.

im_ka · 2004-03-09 16:24:10

thanks for the response, sarah!

the arch installer is ncurses too, right? that might be something for me.
i'll do a search on in google once i'm done cleaning my appartement :?

anyone else? other ideas?

Dusty · 2004-03-09 16:39:10

ncurses is perfect for console GUIs; you don't need X running. Problem is, it sometimes looks goofy if you run it in a terminal emulator inside of X (but really, who ever does that!? :-D)

I personally recommend Java and Swing for almost all GUI work, it's my favourite programming language, and a very powerful GUI toolkit. It can hard to make it interface with C command-line tools though. You either need access to a C library (using Java Native Interface), or to the commandline itself (using exec). It's just easier to program.

I've never used it, but a lot of people seem to enjoy tk/tcl with Python. Python's a good langauge; I have no idea what the tcl toolkit is like. I suspect that might be your easiest option.

If you're looking for powerful instead of easy, C and GTK are exactly what you need!

Dusty

im_ka · 2004-03-09 17:17:13

thanx dusty. the app is not that complex, and i've learned some java in college, so i'll might give that a try.

it should mainly be used under x, so it looks like ncurses is not an option then.

i might have a look into c though, but java seems to be easier. tell me about swing

Dusty · 2004-03-09 17:50:19

These should be helpful:

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial … index.html
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial … index.html

Basically, you start with a static main method, create a JFrame extension from in it, create the display, add events for buttons and components. To interface with a commandline app, you can use Runtime.getRuntime().exec(); take a look at the java api (under java.lang) for the various versions of the exec method.

You can e-mail me directly (dusty at buchuki.com) if you have questions, though for professional style advice, the forums at java.sun.com might be more effective (though perhaps not so friendly :-D)

Dusty

im_ka · 2004-03-09 18:57:07

thanks 4 the infos dusty!

actually, the app i wanted to make a gui for was abcde. but i realized that it's so simple that there's no point in making a gui for it.

but i might stumble across other apps where it really makes sense to make a gui, maybe abcde will be good for getting me started. don't know. 8)

Arch Linux

#1 2004-03-09 15:06:21

wanna create a gui for an app

#2 2004-03-09 16:07:31

Re: wanna create a gui for an app

#3 2004-03-09 16:24:10

Re: wanna create a gui for an app

#4 2004-03-09 16:39:10

Re: wanna create a gui for an app

#5 2004-03-09 17:17:13

Re: wanna create a gui for an app

#6 2004-03-09 17:50:19

Re: wanna create a gui for an app

#7 2004-03-09 18:57:07

Re: wanna create a gui for an app

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