Re: Trouble: GTK + Octave + PThreads

[Joao Cardoso]

Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
...
> >>>>> "JWE" == John W Eaton <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>     JWE> Are you working on creating a set of programmable GUI objects
>     JWE> that can be used from Octave, or a GUI front end that would
>     JWE> communicate with Octave?

Out of the thread, but I can't understand this distinction very well
from a practical point of view.

It is easy to create and manipulate graphical objects from within
Octave, say having an X based menu.m or input.m -- in this case you
would say that Octave would be creating and manipulating the menu
buttons. Then you need to have Xxx linked with Octave, and Octave would
call the Xxx API as a C program would do. And Octave would have to
implement the event_loop of the Xxx, to enable redraws, exposure and
other events. This is what happens with my plplot_octave and tk_octave
package (apart from the event loop issue).

But what happen when you need to create a complicate front-end to your
Octave scripts? say a signal processing package? Then you have lots of
objects, menus, buttons, scales, entries, etc. In this case it is not
practical to program all those basic entities from Octave, so why not
use an external program to generate and draw the graphical objects, and
use Octave for the signal processing part?
This is the approach that I take with tk_octave when a really
complicated front-end is desired: I launch an independent "wish" that
takes care of everything. And I can even use a GUI builder for the hard
design part and don't care with geometry questions.
After all, it is this last approach that is used with gnuplot: it is an
external program that receive commands from Octave.

Thoughts?
Joao
-- 
Joao Cardoso                |   e-mail: address@hidden
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