1 Introduction

The QTk module implements a description-based abstraction to help programmers efficiently build graphical user interfaces. Windows are built in a declarative way, expressing the widgets that compose the window along with their geometry. Widgets can be dynamically controlled by handles. Miscellaneous facilities are also provided to facilitate the development of an application's GUI. The QTk module is dedicated to Oz 3. It can be loaded by:

The documentation is split in the following chapters:

1.1 Description-based User Interface Specification

The QTk module is based on using descriptions to define user interfaces. A description is an Oz record value.

In general, there are three main ways of defining user interfaces:

QTk uses the description approach, where the descriptions are Oz record values. Note that the QTk Prototyper provides an interactive interface; this regains part of the advantage of using an Interface Builder. The Macintosh has popularized the notion of "resources", which are graphical descriptions of user interfaces that correspond to records. However, they are intended to be used graphically, through an Interface Builder. Consequently they are limited to parts of the user interface known before the execution of the application. Description records on the other hand can be calculated on the fly as needed at runtime by the application.

The description approach is particularly useful in a symbolic language such as Oz that allows easy and concise creation of data structures. QTk uses record values, which are well supported by Oz. For example, the following code defines a record and references it in D:

 
   declare 
   D=td(button(text:"Show" 
               action:proc{$} {Show 'Hello World'end)
        button(text:"Close" 
               action:toplevel#close))

The record with label td has two fields that themselves contain records defining two buttons that are labelled Show and Close. These buttons are linked to the actions of displaying Hello World and closing the window.

There are at least five advantages to using descriptions:

By mixing functions and records, descriptions can be made both concise and readable. Here's an example:

 
   declare 
   In Out
 
   fun {Txt T H S}  
      lr(glue:nswe
         label(text:T)
         text(handle:H glue:nswe tdscrollbar:S))  
   end 
 
   fun {But T A}  
      button(glue:we text:T action:A)  
   end 
 
   D=td(tdrubberframe(glue:nswe
           {Txt "Expression" In  false}
           {Txt "Result"     Out true})
        lr(glue:we
           {But "Eval" proc {$} V={E {In get($)}} in {Out set(V)} end}
           {But "Quit" toplevel#close}))

The functions Txt and But shorten the writing of the record D. This defines a window with one rubber frame, two text labels, two text boxes (including one with scrollbar), two buttons (each with an action). One of the actions is a procedure that does a calculation (defined by the function E), the other simply closes the window. The text boxes have handle parameters that give control over these widgets. Here, one of the boxes is read (through the get method) and the other is written (through the set method).


Donatien Grolaux
Version 1.3.0 (20040413)