This is the v1.0 alpha 1 release of my application framework. What makes this application framework noteworthy is that it provides the ability to write applications that can run under both the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows environments.
I pull this trick off, by the way, by providing a thin layer of abstraction to hide only the event loop, window handling, and other very basic functionality. Not everything is hidden--in particular, this assumes you know how to write software with both the MacOS QuickDraw and the Win32 GDI APIs.
This is my first alpha release of this software. It is 'alpha' quality because many class instances still need to be written, and some portions of the XGWindow, XGDocument, and XGDialog classes need to be tested.
Otherwise, this should be a pretty stable release. In fact, large chunks of the code have been stable for *years*; I'm just getting around to releasing the thing now.
By the way, if you want to know what the hell is going on, I suggest opening the (Documents):intro.html file using your favorite web-browser.
I am releasing this according to the terms of the GNU Library General Public License. My goal to doing this is twofold. First, I wish to keep this library totally free to anyone who wants to use the library. And second, I hope that others may become interested in this technology and contribute bug fixes and documentation for this library.
And I hope it's useful.
I do hope to be the central authority on integrating changes to this product, though I have no illusions about the software going out there and having a life of it's own without me. So to that end, if you do have any suggested changes, bug reports, or (hopefully!) bug fixes, please send them to me at woody@alumni.caltech.edu, and I will try to incorporate them into the framework.
Please note that I am doing this on my own time. Which means that I probably will be a little flaky, so please bare with me.
Also, note that my philosophy with this framework is not to provide the swiss-army knife application framework solution, but to hide just the ickiest parts of the Macintosh and Windows environments. By hiding the icky parts, I hope to provide an easy way to get a portable application off the ground with very little overhead. In particular, by keeping the API simple, I hope to make it possible to keep the learning curve down.
Anyways, this is my first alpha release. Hopefully we'll have the kinks out of this package shortly.
Oh, and on my wish-list is to provide a version of this library which includes support for X-Windows. Specifically, it would be nice to provide a wrapper for Motif or some other Xt Widget library. Which means that you could potentially write your application once, and with the right forethought and a little bit of elbow grease, port the application to the Macintosh, to Microsoft Windows, and X-Windows!
