Rexx Programmer's Reference

Chapter 16. Graphical User Interfaces

Overview

This chapter explores graphical user interface or GUI packages. It gives you an overview of the major packages, explains when to use each, and explores how to design scripts that use them.

GUI development is a detail-oriented process and scripts that create and manage GUIs typically require many lines of code. We cannot cover all the ins and outs of GUI programming in a single chapter. GUI programming is a study in its own right. It means learning the many functions, parameters and attributes involved in windows programming. Our goals here are to describe the different GUI interfaces available to Rexx programmers and offer guidance on the advantages and drawbacks of each. We also give you an idea of the structure and design of typical GUI-based scripts. The sample scripts are quite basic, yet studying them should equip you to move into more serious GUI scripting.

As a universal scripting language, Rexx runs on every imaginable platform. One advantage of this versatility is that several GUI packages interface with Rexx. These include Rexx/Tk, Rexx/DW, Rexx Dialog, OODialog, GTK+, Dr. Dialog, VX*Rexx, and VisPro/REXX. The downside to this variety is that no single GUI interface has established itself as the de facto standard for Rexx developers.

In this chapter, we'll first briefly characterize the major GUIs available for Rexx scripting. For each, we'll mention some of its advantages and uses, and we'll list the environments in which it ...