Deployment

There are a number of features of the GUIKit framework that aid deployment of user interface definitions with your own AddOns so that they can be easily executed when needed. Instead of programmatically building up an expression that represents a user interface and calling GUIRun or GUIRunModal dynamically, there is also a filesystem directory within every AddOn where user interface definitions will automatically be discovered. Any definitions placed within a subdirectory folder of an AddOn named "GUI/" can be loaded with a relative pathname beginning with the path within the "GUI/" directory. This follows the similar convention of Java classes and jars being discovered by J/Link for files located within the "Java/" subdirectory of an AddOn.

Upon startup of the GUIKit` package all AddOns are checked for a "GUI/" subdirectory and these paths are combined into a stored path list as $GUIPath. This path list is used when loading user interface definitions from the filesystem. Some typical locations for AddOns applications are shown below.

Locations for user Wolfram System applications that are searched by GUIKit.

This path list is generated on startup of the GUIKit` package by finding all "GUI/" subdirectories in all AddOns.

The relative path "Wolfram/Example/Calculator" is all that is needed to load a file located at "SomeAddOn/GUI/Wolfram/Example/Calculator.xml".

GUIKit definitions can be stored on the filesystem and used in either the XML format, GUIKitXML, using an .xml extension, or the Wolfram Language expression format using a .m extension. The possible extension of a user interface definition can be excluded when specifying its relative pathname. First, a file with the given relative pathname and extension ".xml" is searched for, followed by a file with extension ".m" if an XML version is not found. This allows you to freely mix XML and Wolfram Language definitions when defining interfaces. One implementation detail is that all interface definitions at runtime are converted to the XML form when created so there is some minor benefit of deploying your final AddOn interface definitions in the XML representation. You do not however have to recreate the XML version of your expressions by hand, but can simply use Export["file.xml",expr,"GUIKitXML"] to let the GUIKit system create the equivalent XML definition for you, since it automatically registers a "GUIKitXML" format with Import and Export when the GUIKit` package is loaded.

A Sample Application

The layout of a sample application that contains a specialized user interface driven by GUIKit is shown below.

Compute
    Kernel
        init.m
    Compute.m
    GUI
        ZoroCorp
            ComputeGUI.m
            ComputeScript.m

Layout of a sample application.

The application is called Compute, and the main Wolfram Language code lives in the file Compute.m. This is all in the standard way for Wolfram System applications. The user interface definitions go into the GUI directory and can be accessed from Wolfram Language code in Compute.m. A sample of how this could be arranged is shown below.

Needs["GUIKit`"]

...
  Module[ {ref},
    ref = GUIRun[ "ZoroCorp/ComputeGUI"] ;
    ...
  ]

Running a GUI from application code.

This application could be installed in one of the standard locations for Wolfram System applications, for example $UserBaseDirectory/Applications, and then it could be used.

As can be seen, the GUI definitions are placed in a subdirectory named ZoroCorp. This is done to make sure that there is no conflict if somebody else releases a GUI named ComputeGUI.

To be even more reusable and modular, the design has broken out the code used in scripts for the GUI into a separate file ComputeScript.m. This is loaded from the GUI as shown below.

Widget["Frame",
  {
  ...
  Script[{}, ScriptSource -> "ComputeScript.m"]
  }
]

Using an external script from inside a GUI definition.

Breaking out the Wolfram Language code into a separate script file is most useful when you have more than one GUI component that uses the same code.

The Wolfram Workbench is a development environment for the Wolfram Language. It contains a number of useful features for working with GUIKit. These include creating Wolfram System applications that contain GUI definitions and helping you to develop your GUI with debugging tools. It is described in the tutorial "Wolfram Workbench Support".