eGTK - multi-compiler Eiffel/Gtk interface

Gtk+ is a widget toolkit for X-window systems. Gtk+ appears to be the most popular open source toolkit available today on Linux. Although Gtk+ was developed to work with X-windows, a port to MS Windows exists. In principle you should be able to use the eGTK Eiffel bindings with Gtk+ on Windows.

The main goal of the eGTK library is to be portable among the various Eiffel compilers. The development is done with ISE and SmallEiffel compilers. Ports to Halstenbach and Visual Eiffel will be done at a later date.

The compilers being used are:

• ISE Eiffel 5.1
• SmartEiffel 1.1 (beta)

GTK+ library and glade GUI builder have been ported to Windows, so it's probably possible to use eGTK on Windows.

Downloads

• eGTK_0.3.6-2.tar.gz - the latest eGTK library. Released on January 17th, 2003. For the most recent code always check the CVS - see CHANGELOG for details of the changes.
• http://www.lfix.co.uk/eiflib - the CVS tree of the most recent version of the library.
• download GTK+ from here - the eGTK code has been tested with GTK+ 1.2.x.
• eGTK_0.3.5.tar.gz - previous release for historical purposes only.

Browse the short forms of eGTK classes here. This documentation was produced with SmallEiffel, so in some places you may see references to specific SmallEiffel routines and classes even though the eGTK classes are in fact portable.

Here are the obligatory screen shots: simpler widgets and Gnome canvas, Clist and CTree widgets.

• The ISE 4.5 compiler and SmallEiffel -0.77 have a problem when interfacing to GTK+ if you use Windows and MS Visual C compiler. There is an incompatibility between EIF_BOOLEAN type and 'unsigned char'. This results in bad boolean values passed to GTK+ routines.
  The solution requires that the external declarations be rewritten to force proper casting. In the future eGTK will use GOTE to generate the external classes automatically. (Thanks to Eugene Melkhov for pointing this out).
  Note that this problem does not affect Linux and gcc.
• EGTK_WIDGET_FACTORY is not finished yet, so you may get errors when trying to create some types of widgets. It's easy to add new types.
• I added a BUGS file that describes several bugs that I wasn't able to fix. If you are adventurous take a look.
• I created a more formal TODO file listing the easier things that need to be done. Just pick one and start coding.
• The big TODO for the next version will be adapting GOTE to work with SmallEiffel and with ISE, and to use it to generate all external declarations and the needed C glue code.

• January 17th, 2003 - version 0.3.6-2 released (most work done by Oliver Elphick). See ChangeLog for details of changes (synch up with latest eglade).
• April 22nd, 2002 - version 0.3.6-1 released (most work done by Oliver Elphick). See ChangeLog for details of changes. Can be used with ISE Eiffel 5.x.
• July 12th, 2000 - finally released version 0.3.5. Many changes, including begining of Gnome support.
• March 31st, 2000 - added a link to EXG library.
• March 17th, 2000 - add links to two applications that use eGTK: eLauncher and Calculator IV.
• March 13th, 2000 - added a "known problems" section. Although another tarball has not been released, a lot of code was added to eGTK. If you can try and take the source from the CVS.
• December 15th, 1999 - version 0.3.4-1 released. Fixes to get rid of some SE warnings and some cleanup of obsolete classes.
• December 10th, 1999 - version 0.3.4 released. Includes number of bugfixes, improvements to GTK_PIXMAP and GTK_WIDGET, and new examples. See CHANGELOG file for details.
• October 25th, 1999 - removed all references to EIFFEL_GTK (replaced with EGTK) and renamed the archive file to eGTK-0.3.3-1.tar.gz.
• October 15th, 1999 - version 0.3.3-1. Bug fixes in GTK_IDENTIFIED and related C code for 64-bit machines.
• October 9th, 1999 - version 0.3.3. This is mainly a snapshot of current CVS, but many things changed (for details see CHANGELOG). Here are the highlights:
  • Directories for the classes were rearranged. You have to adjust your Ace and loadpath.se files.
  • Lots of new widgets added.
  • Generalized memory management for all widgets (see EGTK_WIDGET_FACTORY).
  • New examples.
• 6/2/99 - version 0.3.2 released. Many additions, new widgets, bug fixes etc. Revised design for handling callbacks - idea taken from Paul Janzen's and Francois Pennach's SmallEiffel library. We also named the library eGTK.
• 2/13/99 - added GTK_FILE_SELECTION widget and updated to work with Gtk+ 1.1.14.
• 1/2/99 - added GTK_DIALOG widget and a test in test_gtk. Fixed some classes that produced warnings under SE (thanks to all who pointed out the error).
• 12/16/98 - We now have a mailing list to discuss the Eiffel/gtk project. I also added a link to Paul Janzen's page which contains another version of the SmallEiffel/Gtk+ interface. My plan is to integrate this code into my library.
• 12/7/98 - I adapted the code to SmallEiffel. Now all of this library can be compiled with SmallEiffel (I'm using -0.79beta7).
• 7/25/98 - my code was retested with Gtk+ 1.0.4. I started to work on a canvas widget in Eiffel. I split handling of GDK events and GTK signals into separate classes.
• 3/11/98 - initial posting.

The developers include: Dave E. Martin XIII, Daniel Elphick, Oliver Elphick, Pirmin Kalberer and Richie Bielak. Luc Taesch contibuted most of the code for Gnome Canvas and Andreas Leitner did all the work on interfacing with Mozilla.

Code was also contributed by Jörgen Tegne´r and Friedrich Dominicus, and we have "stolen" code and ideas from Francois Pennach and Paul Janzen's library, and from VEGTK library.

Eiffel/Gtk+ Links

Other Eiffel/Gtk+ bindings
• EXG - this library is recent evolution of the original "eiffel-gtk" library. The web site includes a small tutorial on use of the library.
• http://www.eiffel.com - ISE also has a version of Eiffel Vision based on the GTK+ toolkit (although I can't find a specific page describing this library on their site).

Applications written using Eiffel and one of the above bindings.

• Daniel Elphick developed eglade - backend for generating Eiffel code for Glade UI builder.
• Mico/E - CORBA/Eiffel binding uses eGTK in some of its examples.
• Frank Boehme wrote the game of Neutron and Co-Neurton, Niwie, using SmallEiffel and Paul Janzen's libraries.
• eFractal is a really nice looking application of Eiffel and the EXG GTK+ bindings written by Mark Arrasmith. Mark has helped us test eGTK code on a 64-bit machine.

Eiffel links:

• elj.com - number one place for most current info about the Eiffel world.
• Eiffel Forum - the main archive of Eiffel code.

A Yahoo group exists to discuss eGTK. Take a look eiffel-egtk-discuss.

Current version: 0.3.6-2

508 classes and 38,769 LOC

0.3.6-1 37,974 LOC, 0.3.5 had 37,502 LOC of Eiffel, 0.3.4 had, 27,928 LOC of Eiffel, 0.3.3 was 26,359 LOC and 0.3.2 was 11,500 LOC of Eiffel