Special

Introducing the “Welcome to Xojo” Bundle!

New to Xojo and looking for guidance? We've put together a terrific bundle to welcome you! Xojo Bundle

This bundle includes six back issues of the magazine -- all of year 21 in printed book and digital formats -- plus a one-year subscription (beginning with 22.1) so you'll be learning all about Xojo for the next year. It's the perfect way to get started programming with Xojo. And you save as much as $35 over the non-bundle price!

This offer is only available for a limited time as supplies are limited, so hurry today and order this special bundle before the offer goes away!

Article Preview


Buy Now

Issue 3.6

COLUMN

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

...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.