• NAME
• INTRODUCTION
• FEATURES
• Win32::GUI controls
• Win32::GUI classes
• Other interesting modules
• DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
• AUTHOR

NAME

Perl Oasis source guide

INTRODUCTION

Many, many times when coding Win32::GUI stuff I have had to look at existing code and try to figure out how to do things. I hope that you can benefit from this code in a similar way.

Note that apart from how-to-use-this-and-that-control, the code isn't stellar. The gui code is mixed with program logic, and the main class is kind of monolithic. Heavy refactoring needed all over the place.

FEATURES

Win32::GUI controls

These are some of the non trivial controls used in Perl Oasis:

• TabStrip -- The TabStrip works fine but lacks some events, so it doesn't behave 100% like Windows.

• SplitterBar -- Has some problems when it doesn't cover the entire window from top to bottom.

• RichEdit

• Win32::GUI::Scintilla::Perl - used to display Perl code.

• TreeView (workaround with Timer) -- I experienced some problems with Perl crashing using the DblClick event, so I created a workaround.

• Standard Open Dialog

Win32::GUI classes

These are some general Win32::GUI classes I developed to make Win32::GUI programming easier.

• Resizer -- Makes the Resize event much more pleasant to deal with.

• Modalizer -- Standard procedure (as in ``way of doing things'') for displaying a fake modal dialog box.

• TabStripGroup -- Hides/shows the correct controls depending on which tab in a TabStrip is selected.

Other interesting modules

• Win32

• Win32::Clipboard -- Used to find out if the user has copied a file in the Explorer and, if so, convert the clipboard data to text.

• Win32::DDE::Client -- Used to start the Explorer Find/Search.

• XML::Simple -- Used to import & export config info.

  Lesson learned: XML isn't very good for configuration data. Among other things, there's the problem with commenting the settings.

DESIGN PHILOSOPHY

UltraEdit is a nice piece of software. I wouldn't even like to try to keep up with the features that UltraEdit packs.

This leads to an obvious conclusion: Leave to the editor what the editor is good at. Keep the perly things outside of it, but integrate the two as much as possible.

That's Oasis.

AUTHOR

Johan Lindström, johanl@bahnhof.se