Re: Yet another GUI Builder for Octave

[John Swensen]

On Jul 13, 2016, at 7:17 PM, LachlanA <address@hidden> wrote:

Marc,

Generating GUIs from glade sounds like a great idea (although I'm not
personally interested in using it).

It would be great if you could post the code as a patch on Savannah.
[https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?func=additem&group=octave].

One potential trouble will be with callbacks.  In Matlab, callbacks are
typically handles to nested functions, so that they can access shared
variables.  Octave currently can't take handles of nested functions.  I
wrote a simple patch at [https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?39257] that
allows handles to be taken of nested functions.  It lets me make a simple
GUI, but it is not stable enough to be put into production yet.  (It can
crash Octave if the GUI terminates abnormally, such as by ^C or a code
error.)

Cheers,
Lachlan

This may be a great GSoC project for next year. A while ago, I had been wondering what the actual file format of a Matlab .fig file actually is. Their GUI builder GUIDE only outputs a .fig file and an associated .m file. When researching this, I found a website that indicates that .fig file are really just .mat files that store the entire handle hierarchy for the figure

http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/fig-files-format

So, there would be 2 subtasks:

1) Get the .fig import/export as specialized .mat files working

2) Make a QT interface to layout GUIs and generate the associated .fig and .m files

It may be too much for one GSoC, but it might be possible to have one students on each of those subtasks.

John S.