gui tools for octave: proof of concept

[Brian Blais]

Hello,

One of the (few) things that I have found lacking in Octave has been 
tools for making interfaces.  There is tkoctave, but I personally didn't 
find that to be as easy as I would like (the problem on my side, most 
likely).  Anyway, I decided to start to write my own, and you can check 
out the extremely beta, proof of concept at 
http://web.bryant.edu/~bblais/octave/fl.tar

I wrote it for Linux over the past week, and haven't thought much about 
portability, or install scripts at this point (I just wanted something 
to work).  It uses the FL toolkit (www.fltk.org).  I tried to make the 
octave syntax as close to matlab as possible, but it also uses a bit of 
the FL syntax for the menus, like:

uimenu('label','&File/&Open','callback','fileopen;','shortcut','^o');

The thing that makes it a bit different than other projects like this, 
is that it doesn't use external program calls.  It only calls a single 
.oct file, and that file communicates with the parser to do the 
callbacks.  Also, all of the object information is stored in octave, in 
a global structure.  There are get and set functions (uiget, uiset), and 
you can change most properties of the objects (menu names, visibility, 
text, enable,callbacks).   I haven't implemented all of the uiobjects, 
just menus, popups, listbox, editbox, pushbutton and radiobutton.

I do have a couple of questions:

1) is this the proper forum for such announcements?
2) if I carry this through to be more useable, what is the proper 
procedure for distribution?
3) although I don't have the time now, if this eventually wants to be 
included in octave-forge  or something like that, what needs to be done 
for that?  what level of testing is needed, and how do you generate the 
install scripts?
4) if anyone wants to check it out, and give me feedback, that would be 
great!  mostly, I'm just doing it right now to port some interface code 
from Matlab to Octave, but I thought someone might find it useful.


                        thanks,

                                Brian Blais


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