From graphics-request at octave dot org Wed Mar  2 03:08:12 2005
Subject: Proposal for a GUI extension to Octave
From: Driss Ghaddab <driss dot ghaddab at free dot fr>
To: graphics at octave dot org
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2005 10:14:44 +0100

Hi,

I'm planning to add a Matlab like GUI commands to Octave, using the 
infrastructure provided by the extension I just published days ago (CMO,
http://driss.ghaddab.free.fr/cmo/).

To be brief, CMO is a framework that adds an event queue handling to 
Octave, provides an abstract class to easily develop modules using this 
event queue, and also an abstract class to easily develop objects (an 
object is an entity that has properties and methods and which are 
created by the module. The properties and methods are accessible from
within Octave's interpreter using the dot syntax). As the objects are 
represented as a new octave type, they can be regarded as equivalent to 
handle graphics.

The new CMO module will be called OGM (for Octave GUI Module).

There will be an abstract layer that is independent from any graphical 
toolkit, and on top of it there will be a toolkit dependent layer.

I would like to hear what users expect from such a GUI.  I think, that 
Matlab compatibility is a must, but we may also improve it and add 
missing features (users feedback requested).

I have currently some questions:

1. Widget toolkits: should the widget toolkit be selected at compile 
time or should it be made a runtime option? The runtime option will add 
to the user the burden of the choice, so I'm inclined to use the compile 
time approach.

2. What enhancements should be added? What do users miss from Matlab's 
way of doing GUIs?

3. Concerning an eventual GUI builder (like GUIDE): this will be 
postponed.  An idea would be to use available GUI builders (glade & 
similar builders) and use external scripts to create the relevant .m 
files.  As we use the Matlab syntax, a parallel project can already be 
started without waiting for OGM to finish.

4. Does the implementation of such a GUI compatible with Matlab imply 
some licensing or IP problems? I'm using the Matlab documentation as 
seen on their site.

I do not plan to implement the plotting functions, I'll just try to 
adapt an existing one (octaviz, gnuplot, plplot come to mind. I'm not 
using a specific desktop (nor KDE, nor GNOME), so I do not plan to use 
desktop specific libraries).

Every comment is welcome,

Cheers

-- 
Driss Ghaddab