Preface
About this manual
This manual, Building Applications using DUIM, provides an introduction to developing your own windowed applications using Functional Developer and, in particular, the interface-building functionality provided by the DUIM library suite. It is designed to complement Getting Started with Functional Developer, which provides information on using the Functional Developer development environment, and the DUIM Reference Manual, which provides a complete reference to the DUIM library suite. You are advised to look at Getting Started with Functional Developer before reading this manual in any depth.
This manual is divided into several parts:
Chapter 1, "Introduction", provides an introduction to the concepts behind the DUIM libraries, and their intended use.
Chapter 2, "Designing A Simple DUIM Application", through to Chapter 5, "Adding Callbacks to the Application", provide an extended example of how to use DUIM to design the user interface to an application. A simple working application is developed from first principles, and this is used as an illustration of some of the most useful features provided by the DUIM libraries. Chapter 2 provides an initial design for the application, Chapter 3 improves on this initial design. Chapter 4 shows you how you can add a menu system to an application and Chapter 5 demonstrates how to give the application some useful functionality. Chapter 6, "Using Command Tables", introduces the concept of command tables, by re-implementing some of the functionality already described in Chapter 4. For reference, the full source code of the application described in these chapters is provided in Appendix A, "Source Code For The Task List Manager".
Chapter 7, "A Tour of the DUIM Libraries", provides an overall tour of what is available in the suite of DUIM libraries. It provides much less detail than the chapters covering application development, but covers a broader spectrum of functionality. This chapter can be seen as a general introduction to the material covered in the DUIM Reference Manual.
The material provided in Chapter 7 is reasonably independent from the material provided in Chapters 2 to 5, and if you wish, you can read through the tour before looking at the example application. Whichever order you approach them in, you should expect some repetition of subject matter, however.