7 A Tour of the DUIM Libraries

7.5 A tour of frames

As you will have seen if you worked through the task list manager example application, frames are the basic components used to display DUIM objects on-screen. Every window in your application is a general instance of <frame>, and contains a hierarchy of sheets. Frames control the overall appearance of the entire window, and organize such things as menu bars, tool bars, and status bars.

A subclass of <frame>, <simple-frame>, is the way to create basic frames. Usually, you will find it most convenient to define your own classes of frame by subclassing <simple-frame>.

The event loop associated with a frame is represented by a queue of instances, each instance being a subclass of <event>. The most important events are subclasses of <device-event>, for example, <button-press-event> and <key-press-event>. Unless you intend defining your own event or sheet classes, you do not need to understand events.

Different types of frame are provided, allowing you to create normal windows, as well as dialog boxes (both modal and modeless), property pages and wizards.

Support for frames is provided by the DUIM-Frames library.