Comparisons/GUI

General words on GUI

Command Line Interface, Menus / Dialog Boxes, Spreadsheet, Notebook (like mathematica), Web appli.

Many teachers prefer to use a CLI, even with their beginner students, because it forces good habits in data analysis (the user must really know what he is doing). A beginner in front of a simple GUI can click everywhere and get results anyway, even if these results are meaningless.

best practice when desinging a GUI. Also : offer two levels (or more): beginner / expert user. And choose your goal: teaching, research or demonstration.

2D graphing and charting

Archive on google groups

interface to gnuplot

plplot

ocaml bindings

older partial binding

PsiLab

older, based on OCaml 3.01 or 3.02. Fairly high-level binding to the plplot libraries which is quite easy to use.

mlgrace

Currently no API to create point labels, but this can be done with a small amount of touch-up work from the GUI (under Plot->Set Appearance->Ann. values).

Bindings to the OpenGL 3D library

OpenGL is the most cross-platform GUI-capable API and runs on virtually any modern computer, typically with performance orders of magnitude better than anything you'll get with Qt, GTK, WxWindows or any other software renderer.

Each of the 3 openGL binding resolve the problem of the GLenum parameters (that often collide between several functions) in a different way.

GLCaml provides one big glenum type that contains all the parameters for all the functions (so it seems there is no type check at all)
LablGL uses polymorphic variants
glMLite packs the problematic types in modules.

There's also the problem of C buffers (C arrays).

LablGL provides a dedicated module Raw wich allocs bunches of memory and provides access to it.
GLCaml wraps with ocaml bigarrays or ocaml strings.
glMLite uses Bigarrays.

LablGL

There are also (semi-)binary releases for windows, that can be used directly with the OCaml MSVC or mingw ports. ocamlopt is now supported in binary releases.
the most widely used (thus tested) OpenGL bindings. (412 installs on Debian and Ubuntu according to the package popularity contests (along what period?)).
its API provides camlized function names and packs related functions together with modules
only supports a subset of OpenGL 1.

GLCaml

A dynamic cross-platform Ocaml binding for OpenGL and extensions.

generic unix, Solaris, Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.
BSD license, SDLCaml remains under the LGPL.
most up-to-date (OpenGL 2 API)
uses an OCaml program to generate the bindings automatically: easier to keep up to date but lower-level.
no interface for GLU
no packages

glMLite

keeps the openGL function names and parameter names unchanged
wrapper module allows to use glMLite with LablGL's interface
it is possible to run Lablgl scripts with glMLite
provides a lot a examples from the Red-Book and from other sources
provides a module to load JPEG images
there's an average of 15 downloads per month

openGL in native compiled Ocaml Graphics.cmxa

http://www.elliottoti.com/code/glgraphics/glgraphics.tar.gz

Other

LablTk/CamlTk

mini tutorial

Also look for "deuglification tutorial".

LablGTK

Interface to GTK2. more widgets in gtk2, but they can be harder to use.

examples

Gtk+ libraries for windows

example of GUI compiling both under Windows and Unix

widgets looking like those of windows

Wxcaml

built using CamlIDL from the WxWidgets headers.
WxWidgets allows true native widgets across all three major platforms (?).
WxWindows doesn't support a rich canvas widget, nor a good rich text editor.

Also have a look at http://coherentgraphics.blogspot.com/2008/03/proper-gui-for-ocaml-part-one.html

Cairo

OCaml Visualization Toolkit is built around cairo-ocaml.

functional reactive GUI

gazpacho

"like glade but better"
with windows installer
glade or gazpacho needs the lablgtk binding to libglade (the runtime part to use a GUI description). It can be compiled on windows, and it is included in the source distribution, but not in the binary distribution. You might try to compile it yourself.

Libevent

Not a library, it doesn't control invert. It is a monolithic framework. Your code will no longer be composable. In particular, there is no way to compose two such frameworks, for example you cannot use it with an event driven GUI framework. To quote the manpage: "In order to process events, an application needs to call event_dispatch(). This function only returns on error, and should replace the event core of the application program." Just try telling a GUI that *also* demands you use ITS event loop that!

The only proper way to use libevent would be to spawn the dispatch loop inside a pthread, and use the hook functions to communicate with your program via channels. It isn't immediately clear this would work (libevent's single page of documentation doesn't explain if it works when spawned inside a pthread).

wrapper for the libevent library

SDL

See http://alan.petitepomme.net/cwn/2007.03.13.html#4

Osiris

Smoke

hardware-accelerated vector graphics library, suited to write visualization software.

There is a full version (with source code) and a free version (bytecode only).

Comparisons » GUI