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I am curious to know if there is any kind of programming library/framework for the C language for cross-platform programming of course. I mean there are already frameworks like Wxwidgets, Boost, Qt, U++ and etc for C++ available but I have not yet found any for C .
Updated Info:
We are trying to build an underlying Framework/library to be used in our project. We are going to eliminate the dotnet and instead provide a counterpart for those libraries which is fast and less demanding.
We will be working on a server/client based project, and thus the underlying services must be fast and also portable. GUI is not our priority now, but libraries providing threading capabilities is of importance to us.
And for the ANSI part, I think we are fine with that at the moment unless something changes that in the future.
if you write plain ANSI C, it should work on every POSIX system.
The most successful example of cross platform C library is standard C library itself (IMHO).
If you're looking for GUI toolkit GTK is the answer,
if you're looking for terminal UI, ncurses is pretty portable.
If you're looking for general use libraries, as long as they're written in ANSI C, should work almost everywhere, as long as it doesn't use system level APIs.
Can you just tell us, what kind of library/framework you are looking for ?
GTK+ is long established and actively maintained cross-platform C-only (or primarily) toolkit. You'll find not only on-line documentation but also books written about it. It is the framework backing up the GNOME project.
GTK+ is meant to build applications with UI, first of all. However, even if you don't need UI you'll find that some GTK+ components, namely GLib, provide general multiplatform support comparable with Qt. Actually, I needed a framework without UI at first and chose GLib over APR because I was able to find documentation and tutorials easier.
GTK+ was initially developed on UN*X an X-Windows which remains the platform where you can get it running the most easily. I wouldn't say that it is more difficult on Windows; it is just that you have more compiling environment options. I started with prepared GTK+ packages and MinGW but ended up integrating GTK+ with MSVC.
GTK+ exists for a long time and some people may find it old-school. On the other hand, it shows that it has proven to be stable and useful. There are also bindings for C++ and C#.
As with every big framework, the more you need from it the longer you will have to learn. But the other way round it works too; the more you learn the more you'll be able to do with it. Consistent coding style helps getting used to it.
--- Ferda
I've been around Visual Basic for years in high school, and I've grown up with the IDE supplied by Microsoft. It'd wonderful, but the educational and "working-model" editions of VB available to me through school don't allow me to redistribute software, as part of the EULA with Microsoft.
I instead find myself working in perl to design programs for friends and family, and it works fairly well, but I don't have a firm grasp on building user interfaces yet. I understand I could design user-interfaces with tcl/tk for perl, but the notion of coding all of that by hand is a bit daunting to me. That brings me to my question.
Do you have any suggestions for a tool I could use that would allow me to build GUIs for my perl programs?
Thanks in advance!
In addition to what tsee suggested, you can have a look at :
Perl/Qt (using Qtdesigner) and Perl::GladeXML (using Glade)
With Glade and Qtdesigner, you can generate a XML file that will describe your user interface and it will be a matter of hooking your perl code to widget's events.
I don't think you will find something as simple and well integrated for Perl as the Visual Basic GUI builder. A couple of pointers:
wxGlade can be used to design GUIs for the Wx GUI toolkit (for Perl, not only Python).
For Win32::GUI, you can use the GUI Loft to achieve something similar.
I think there's a bunch of other GUI builders including at least one for Tk, but I don't remember the name.
Either way, I believe you will have to accept that you have to do more coding vs. designing when compared to VB. The upside is that if you use Tk or Wx, your programs may well be portable to all major operating systems.
For a Perl-specific development environment, you might want to check out Padre, which is itself written in Perl using Wx. It's under active development, so eventually, somebody will probably integrate a GUI builder, too.
Frankly, having thought about GUIs for years and never getting round to them, I've found the best way to distribute GUI apps with perl is to use Catalyst, its built in server and for windows users, distributing it with Strawberry Perl (the professional edition comes with Catalyst included). For Linux or Mac users a local::lib installation to pull in the required cpan modules. Optionally bundle in a copy of portable firefox if you want not to have the usual web development pain caused by internet explorer.
tl;dr; Sidestep the whole issue by going for web development with a framework that comes with its own standalone server.
What are the disadvantages of the Tk module compared to other solutions to create a GUI in Perl?
I toured the various gui modules for Perl recently, and here is my summary (disclaimer: ultimately I found that none of the existing modules met my needs so I started writing my own gui toolkit).
Tk - Decent to work with and the interface is very perlish. The gui itself is a bit dated looking, and doesnt take advantage of any of the operating system's native widgets (like filepickers). On most systems it will require a C compiler to install.
Wx - Difficult to work with, un-perlish interface. Large programs almost require a gui builder to keep track of everything. Support for os level widgets is mixed. Nicer looking than Tk IMO. Compilation is involved, requires installing several libraries, can be difficult to get running on windows. The assembly of programs is very procedural, and does not map cleanly to what the program will actually look like.
Qt - last I looked this module was more or less abandoned and only supports Qt3. I didn't try to install it, but i imagine it needs a compiler.
Prima - Similar to Tk it has a dated appearance. Requires a compiler.
W32::GUI - I ruled this out early since it is not cross platform.
XUL::Node / POE::XUL::Node - rather heavy dependency tree that includes C code. Seems unmaintained and I had mixed experiences getting it to install. Windows was a no go, OSX was a no go, it had limited functionality on OpenSUSE. It also only supports a subset of the XUL language.
I found that none of the existing gui toolkits made it easy enough to distribute your application to end users. It is ok to expect programmers to jump through the hoops of resolving library dependencies and compiling code, but end users aren't going to do that. So the first requirement I had was to be pure Perl.
Secondly, nearly all of the existing gui toolkits force you to work in a very procedural manner: Create a container. Create a packer for the container. Create an object. Set properties on that object. Add the object to the packer. Run the packer to fill the container object. Repeat.
Instead, I find that nested design (like HTML) is easier to follow for two reasons. First off, since objects are nested, there is no need to name everything (label_456, label_457...). Secondly, the structure of the program mirrors the structure of what is displayed.
So I started work on XUL::Gui, and its been coming along rather well. It is pure Perl, and only depends on core modules for ease of installation. It has one external requirement, which is that a recent (3+) copy of Firefox is installed. It uses the familiar design pattern of web development with nested tags styled with CSS. It is certainly at a level where you could write fully featured single window applications with it.
Hopefully this helps you to figure out which toolkit is best for your project.
Tk has not been developed in a very long time. ActiveState now recommends development with their Tkx toolkit, which provides a thin layer over TclTk. It means that themed widgets are possible. But, TclTk is still quite primitive compared with many other GUI toolkits.
I haven't tried XUL:Gui but it seems the way to go.
I usually write web apps in PHP, Ruby or Perl. I am starting the study of Scheme and I want to try some web project with this language. But I can't find what is the best environment for this.
I am looking for the following features:
A simple way of get the request parameters (something like: get-get #key, get-post #key, get-cookie #key).
Mysql access.
HTML Form generators, processing, validators, etc.
Helpers for filter user input data (something like htmlentities, escape variables for put in queries, etc).
FLOSS.
And GNU/Linux friendly.
So, thanks in advance to all replies.
Racket has everything that you need. See the Racket web server tutorial and then the documentation. The web server has been around for a while, and it has a lot of features. Probably the only thing that is not included is a mysql interface, but that exists as a package on PLaneT (Racket package distribution tool).
UPDATE: Racket now comes with DB support, works with several DBs including mysql.
You may want to have a look at Clojure:
Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. [...] Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.
Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.
Interop with Java is straightforward in Clojure, so you can re-use any existing Java libraries as you need. I'm sure there are plenty that are useful for web development.
clojure-contrib has an SQL API, and there is ClojureQL as well, which should cover your DB access needs.
There is a web framework for Clojure called Compojure under development. There may be others, too.
Clojure's source is available on github under the EPL. Getting it running on Linux is easy; I just clone the git repos and run ant.
You can do web development with guile scheme. Its standard library includes the (sxml simple) module that is very useful for html generation, manipulation, and parsing. The guile-www library adds support for http, cgi, etc. The guile-dbi library provides access to MySQL and other databases. With these building blocks, you can implement everything from simple cgi scripts to web applications with their own HTTP server.
Try Weblocks, a Common Lisp web framework:
http://weblocks.viridian-project.de/
I've written a pretty extensive tutorial/ebook on the topic: http://lispwebtales.ppenev.com/
Quick summary:
It uses Common Lisp
It uses the Restas framework
It has examples for pretty much most of basic web development, including DB access, authentication, HTML generation and templating.
Since the Restas documentation is pretty much out of date, my tutorial is the closest thing to up to date docs.
Shows a few of the more advanced features, like policies, which allow you to write pluggable interfaces, for instance you can write a data store layer, and write back-ends for different storage mechanisms with relative ease, the module system which allows you to write reusable components, like auth frameworks and things like that.
It covers things like installing lisp, setting up the ASDF build system and the quicklisp package manager etc.
It's free online, and as soon as I finish it it will be free on leanpub as well. The source is on https://github.com/pvlpenev/lispwebtales under a CC license, the source code is MIT. Not all of it is published yet, and I'm in the process of revising.
This may be what you are looking for.
http://www.plt-scheme.org/
http://docs.plt-scheme.org/web-server/index.html
http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-weblocks/
If you are interested in Common Lisp to be exact and do not want to go the weblocks route I would recommend the following setup:
Use SBCL on Linux but with multiple thread support
Use Hunchentoot as a web server which will provide you with all the server processing required including sessions and cookies
Use ClSql to communicate with MySql it has ample documentation and is very stable.
For the HTMl generation you can use Dr Edi Weitz Cl-WHO (very well documented).
Note all the above are under GPL or similar license (one that works more for lisp programs)
Gambit Scheme has its own solution to web apps as well. It uses the Spork framework, based o the Black Hole module system (both by Per Eckerdal).
Andrew Whaley has an initial tutorial on how to get Gambit, Black Hole and Spork running a web app under Apache using mod_proxy. You might want to take a look at that.
On a (possibly) related note, Gambit will also compile your stuff to C and then to an executable, if you feel so inclined.
Paul Graham (and friends) made a lisp dialect specifically for writing basic web applications. It's called Arc, and you can get it at arclanguage.org.
It's probably not suited for really big complex websites and I'm not sure what state it's database support is at but Paul Graham knows how to write web applications in lisp, so Arc will make the HTTP/HTML part easy for you while you spend most of your brain cycles learning the lisp way.
Weblocks is nice tool for building web apps in Common Lisp, but a bit too heavy-weight for me.
We use the following stack:
OpenMCL (open source Lisp, very nice)
Portable Allegroserve (web server, HTML generator)
Our own Rails-like tools for doing Ajaxy stuff (update: this has now been open sourced as WuWei)
A variety of CL libraries like cl-json, cl-smtp, md5
I use my own, customized version of Scheme, derived from MzScheme. It has a new, simple web-application framework, a built-in web-server (not the one that comes with MzScheme) and ODBC libraries. (http://spark-scheme.wikispot.org/Web_applications). The documentation may not be exhaustive, as this is more of a personal tool. But there are lots of sample code in the code repository.
Clojure is a Lisp dialect which may interest you. At this point there's a pretty decent web development stack. I can recommend a few things:
The leiningen dependency manager which makes is really easy to install and manage libraries that you're using. Pretty nice set of plugins for it too. There's even a plugin for Clojurescript, which is a language based on Clojure that compiles to Javascript.
The ring HTTP server abstraction. Its used in most actual web frameworks. Its a pretty good idea to learn that first before jumping into an actual framework.
hiccup is a HTML dsl/templating language written in Clojure. Its very expressive! Reminds me a bit of Jade, in a sense.
composure would have to be the most popular web framework for Clojure. Its essentially a routing library like express.js.
Let's see what can be done with Common Lisp.
The state of the Common Lisp ecosystem (2015) and the Awesome Common Lisp list show us a couple of modern frameworks (Caveman, Lucerne, all built on the new Clack web application server, an interface for Hunchentoot and other servers). Let's discuss with our own findings.
update 2019: there's a new tutorial on the Common Lisp Cookbook: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/web.html It covers routing, template engines, building self-contained binaries, deployment, etc.
update: a bit later, I found out Snooze, by the creator of Sly or Emacs' Yasnippet, and had a much better impression than say Caveman. Declaring endpoints is just like declaring functions, so some things that were tedious in Caveman are obvious in Snooze, like accessing the url parameters. I don't have much experience with it but I recommend checking it out.
update june 2018: also don't miss the ongoing rewrite of Weblocks, it's going to be huge ! :D http://40ants.com/weblocks/quickstart.html Weblocks allows to build dynamic webapps, without a line of Javascript, without separating the back and front. It is components-based, like React but server-side. It's very alpha as of writing (june 2018), but in progress, and it's working, I have a couple simple web apps working.
A simple way of get the request parameters (something like: get-get #key, get-post #key, get-cookie #key).
I found easier the Lucerne way, it iss as simple as a with-params macro (real world example):
#route app (:post "/tweet")
(defview tweet ()
(if (lucerne-auth:logged-in-p)
(let ((user (current-user)))
(with-params (tweet)
(utweet.models:tweet user tweet))
(redirect "/"))
(render-template (+index+)
:error "You are not logged in.")))
Caveman's way has been less clear to me.
Mysql access
Caveman advertises database integration (with Fukamachi's Datafly and sxql).
You can just use clsql or the Mito ORM: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/databases.html
HTML Form generators, processing, validators, etc.
I don't know if there are form generators out there. edit: there are: cl-forms and formlets, or again 1forms, working with Caveman2.
Caveman does not have one (issue raised in 2011).
Helpers for filter user input data (something like htmlentities, escape variables for put in queries, etc).
Ratify is an input validation library, not integrated into a framework though.
FLOSS and GNU/Linux friendly: ✓
Other web stuff
Speaking about web, there are other nice libraries in CL land:
web servers: Woo is a fast HTTP server, faster than Nodejs (beware of charts…), wookie is an async http server,
Dexador is an HTTP client
Plump, lquery and CLSS make it easy to parse html and query the DOM.
cl-bootstrap offers twitter-bootstrap shortcuts for the cl-who templating engine (which kind of replaces Jade/Pug, even though we have usual templates too).
Ajax in Lisp
(remember, with Weblocks, see above, we might not need those)
With ParenScript, we can write JavaScript in Common Lisp, without living our usual workflow, and we can thus use the fetch web API to write Ajax calls.
Clojure would be perfect for this. With some very short, clean code, you can implement some very complex applications, such as blogs or forums.
You might want to consider the awful web framework for Chicken Scheme.
Natively supports PostgreSQL and SQLite
Built-in easy support for sessions
Shortcuts for some webdev idioms, like the (ajax) procedure
Your app can be easily compiled to a static executable (via csc -static) for easier deployment
The collection of all chicken libraries (eggs) isn't as versatile as in some other programming languages, but isn't awful either
So, there are several languages which will allow you to create a website, as long as you configure the server(s) well enough.
To my knowledge, there is:
PHP
ASP.NET
Ruby(on rails, what is
that all about?)
And thusly, my knowledge is limited. Ruby and ASP, I've only heard of, never worked with. If there are other languages, I suppose they have some way to make files containing the needed html. It would then suffice to add a line to the Apache config to associate the file-extension.
And if other languages: are there any notable characteristics about the one(s) you mention?
ANY language can be use to make a dynamic website - you could do it in COBOL or FORTRAN if you were twisted enough. Back in the olden days (about 10 years ago) most dynamic websites were done with CGI scripts - all you needed was a program that could read data from standard input and write data (usually HTML) to standard output.
Most modern languages have libraries and frameworks to make it easier. As well as the languages you have already mentioned, Java, C# and Python are probably the most common in use today.
Typically a web framework will have:
a way of mapping URLs to a class or function to handle the request
a mechanism for extracting data from a request and converting it into an easy to use form
a template system to easily create HTML by filling in the blanks
an easy way to access a database, such as an ORM
mechanisms to handle caching, redirections, errors etc
You can find a comparison of popular web frameworks on wikipedia.
How can you forget Java ? :)
Python
It runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, and has been ported to the Java and .NET virtual machines.
Python is a perfect scripting language for web applications, e.g. via mod_python for the Apache web server. With Web Server Gateway Interface a standard API has been developed to facilitate these applications. Web application frameworks or application servers like Django, Pylons, TurboGears, web2py and Zope support developers in the design and maintenance of complex applications. Around libraries like NumPy, Scipy and Matplotlib, Python is a standard in scientific computing.
Among the users of Python are YouTube and the original BitTorrent client. Large organizations that make use of Python include Google, Yahoo!, CERN, NASA,and ITA.
This could be for your interest.
Virtually thru CGI all programming languages that produce output may use for web page generation.
Basically, you can use any language (if you are hosting your own server)
Very closely related and very interesting is this article where LISP has been used to build a very succesfull website.
Python has a 3rd party module CherryPy which can be used with or without a http server.
Amongst others: Erlang (YAWS, Mochiweb), Python
JSP has the advantage that it automatically wraps your code in a servlet, compiles that to bytecodes, then uses the just-in-time Java compiler to recompile critical sections into native object code. Not aware of any alternative which allows optimizes your work automatically in this way.
Also allows you to develop and deploy on any combination of Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.
If you'd like to choose one for the beginning, you should check out PHP first. It gives you the basic clues about how dynamic sites work in general.
After you've become familiar with the basics, I recommend ASP.NET.
Fist off, you should know that ASP.NET is a technology and not a language. (It actually supports any language that can be used on the .NET platform.) Also it is not to be confused with classic ASP. (The old ASP was much more like PHP.)
ASP.NET is very easy to begin with, and after you have some clues about its concepts, you can always dig deeper and customize everything in it. The http://asp.net site is a very good starting point, if you are to learn it. I think it is really worth the effort, because even if you choose not to stick to it, it will give you some interesting ideas and concepts.
I tell you its most important advantages:
The code is compiled (and NOT interpreted like PHP), and it has a very good performance. (In a performace comparsion, it is 10-15 times faster. http://www.misfitgeek.com/pages/Perf_Stat_0809.htm)
It can be run on Windows without effort, and on Linux / Mac / etc using the Mono project.
It implements the Separation of Concerns principle very well.
It has most of the general functionality you'll need built-in. (Such as membership, roles, database management, and so on.)