Object I/O Tutorial

The document: "A Tutorial to the Clean Object I/O Library - version 1.2" is useful if you want to write your own Clean programs that have a Graphical User Interface. Although it covers many aspects of the Object I/O Library, it is not a technical reference manual.

Here's an overview of the chapters:

• Introduction: gives the background ideas on programming with the Object I/O Library.
• Global structure of the Object I/O library: provides you with a roadmap to find your way in the modules of the Object I/O API.
• Object identification: explains how to identify GUI components in order to be able to change them at run-time.
• Drawing: handles everything you need to know for drawing.
• Windows and dialogues: introduces you to the major top-level GUI objects that you will find in all interactive applications.
• Control handling: presents all predefined controls in the Object I/O library that can you put in windows and dialogues. It is explained how controls can contain arbitrary sets of controls. Layout between controls and resize issues are handled in this chapter as well.
• Menus: introduces you to another major top-level GUI element. Menus help you to structure the commands of an application in a user-friendly way.
• Timers: explains how you can make your application time-aware.
• Receivers: handles how you can extend your GUI components with a means to send messages of arbitrary type to each other.
• Interactive processes: explains that Object I/O programs are actually collections of interactive processes, and how you can manage them.
• Clipboard handling: handles how to put and get string data from the clipboard.
• Printing: explains how to print almost anything. It also shows you some specialised functions that you can use when you are only printing text.
• TCP: handles how you can extend both non-GUI and GUI programs with a TCP interface, so that your programs can communicate with other programs via the internet.

The definition modules (headers) of all Object I/O API modules can be found in the Appendix. In the tutorial all concepts are illustrated by means of complete Clean programs.

We appreciate any comments on the content, errors, typos, and anything that catches your attention. Please send these to clean@cs.ru.nl This will help us improve the documentation.