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Pictures and Dynamic Libraries: a poor man's plugin
Issue: 3.6 (July/August 2005)
Author: Didier Barbas
Author Bio: Didier has been a dilettante programmer and linguist for more than 20 years. Unusual for a Frenchman, he speaks 11 languages, including Korean and PowerPC machine-language.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 8,380
Starting Page Number: 46
Article Number: 3622
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&
Excerpt of article text...
I am on a quest for faster graphics objects (see issues 2.3 and 3.1) that can be used anywhere, including command-line apps (see the previous issue). I am still pursuing this issue, for fun and for work-related purposes, so I thought I'd share with you today what I am up to. My ultimate goal is to have a Picture framework which works not only in RB (both GUI and console applications), but could also be reusable elsewhere (i.e., in C code, Python scripts, or elsewhere)-- which is why I decided to write a dynamic library that'll do the heavy lifting, leaving RB with the interface layer.
Objectives
We will set up a framework between RB and XCode for a dynamic library that will handle basic graphic manipulations. This will involve the following steps: write C code, write RB code that calls the dylib with Declares, and wrap the RB code into a custom class which should keep things easy and clean for the user.
In this version, we will rely on the Picture class for input/output and display, since we are at the conceptual stage. Ideally, when things get more serious, all GUI-related code will have to go, in order to enable a completely independent class.
Requirements
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