PJWIN - Portable Mobile Windowing Toolkit

Objective

Develop a simple, small-footprint GUI toolkit to build simple applications that are portable across platforms, especially mobile platforms.

The exact same GUI source code should be portable across these platforms:

• Windows
• Windows Mobile Professional/PocketPC platform (i.e. with touch interface)
• Windows Mobile Standard/Smartphone? platform (i.e. without touch)
• Symbian/S60 3rd edition
• (optional) console application
• (optional) Qt application

Basic idea

The basic idea is to use XUL-like interface (see ​XUL, and ​XUL tutorial), but much more simplified.

Sample interactions:

1. Describe the window using XUL-like syntax (the code below is all over the place but hopefully you get the idea):

   const char *xml = 
      "<?xml version="1.0"?>
       <window id="mainwnd"
               title="Hello world">
         <label value="Press the button to exit"/>
         <button id="btn_quit" value="Quit"/>
       </window>";
   

2. Create the window using the XUL XML description:

   window *wnd = create_window(xml);
   

3. For modal dialog, start the dialog, giving it callback function to receive events from the window:

   do_modal(wnd, &event_handler);
   

4. Do some code in the event handler:

   void event_handler(window *wnd, const pj_str_t *element, event *event)
   {
      if (pj_strcmp2(element, "btn_quit")==0)
         end_dialog(wnd);
   }
   

5. And that's it!

The GUI elements

Supported elements:

• window
• hbox and vbox
• spacer
• label (static text)
• command bar (will be translated into buttons or menu on interface with touch capability, or into menu on the rest)
• edit/input control
• combo box control (advanced)
• list control (advanced)

Unsupported elements:

• button (it's only most usable with touch interface)