7 A Tour of the DUIM Libraries
7.1 Introduction
This chapter provides an overview of the gadgets and functionality that are provided by DUIM. Of necessity, it covers a lot of ground in as short a space as possible, and does not attempt to place any information in the more general context of application development.
To gain an understanding of how different pieces of DUIM functionality can be glued together to create a working application, you should follow the extended example given in this manual in Chapter 2 through Chapter 5. If you need more complete information on any particular aspect of DUIM, you should refer to the DUIM Reference Manual.
The most important DUIM classes are as follows:
<frame>A window in your application.
<sheet>A unique piece of any window.
<gadget>Sheets that are window controls.
<layout>Sheets that control the arrangement of other sheets in the sheet hierarchy.
All of these are subclasses of <object>, except <layout> which is a subclass of <sheet>.
As with any other Dylan class, use make to create an instance of a DUIM class.
This chapter introduces you to the most important and useful of all these elements.
- Section 7.2 on page 86 describes many of the gadgets available in DUIM. A wide variety of different gadgets are available in DUIM, to enable you to create applications that utilize all of the controls for the target operating system.
- Section 7.3 on page 115 describes layouts. These are classes that allow you to group together other sheets hierarchically (typically gadgets and other layouts) in order to put together the elements in any window.
- Section 7.4 on page 121 introduces you to the more general concept of sheets. If you intend defining your own sheet classes (for instance, to design your own controls), then you will need to understand how to handle sheets on a more general level than is needed to use gadgets or layouts.
- Section 7.5 on page 123 introduces the different kinds of frame available. There are two basic types of frame: normal windows and dialog boxes. This section also describes how to create your own classes of frame.
You can use the Dylan Playground to run the examples in this chapter. Reminder: to interactively run the segments of example code presented in this chapter, you must pass them to contain (see Section 2.3.4, "Using contain to run examples interactively" for details).