1 Quick Start
1.1 Starting work with Functional Developer
In this section, you will start Functional Developer's development environment, and choose one of several supplied examples to work with.
- 1. Start the Functional Developer environment.
- You can do this by choosing the Start menu shortcut Start > Programs > Functional Developer > Dylan. Functional Developer will also start if you open any file associated with it, such as a Dylan source file.
When Functional Developer starts, the main window appears:
Figure 1.1 The Functional Developer main window.
Figure 1.2 The initial dialog.
The main window will be present throughout your Functional Developer session. It provides a way to set environment-wide options and to control the display of all Dylan windows. To exit Functional Developer, choose File > Exit in the main window.
The initial dialog (Figure 1.2) is there to help you get working quickly, whether by looking at an example project, creating a new project, opening an existing project or text file, or starting an interactive Dylan session in the Dylan playground. (See "Interaction basics using the Dylan playground" on page 112 for more information.)
We want to browse the example projects.
- 2. Select the "Example project" option and click OK.
- The Open Example Project dialog appears.
The Open Example Project dialog shows several categories of example Dylan project. If you expand a category you can see the examples offered.
The "Getting Started" category contains two very simple projects to help you start programming in Dylan and using the libraries included with Functional Developer. The "Documentation" category contains examples from the Functional Developer documentation set. Some categories, such as "CORBA" and "OLE", are only available in editions of Functional Developer that contain support for those technologies.
The source files for the example projects are stored under the top-level Functional Developer installation folder, in the subfolder Examples. Each example has its own project folder. The files that Functional Developer creates when building a project are also stored under this folder.
We are going to look at the example called Reversi, which is in the "Documentation" category.
Figure 1.3 The Functional Developer Examples dialog.
- 3. Expand the "Documentation" category by clicking the + next to it.
- 4. Select "Reversi", then click OK.
- A project window appears.
The project window is one of four programming tools in Functional Developer. The other tools are the browser, the editor, and the debugger.