Andescotia Software | From The Desk

Well, this is meant to be the start of a kind of "blog". But I am not sure what would be of interest to users. A roadmap of future development? Or a discussion of open source? However, I thought it might be of interest of some to learn that we are finally moving towards the creation of Marten on Windows. Windows 7 and later that is. The Windows 7 Marten editor is in the very early stages but it is coming along.

Since Marten is written using Marten, you might wonder how this is being accomplished. The Prograph code for the Windows Marten IDE is created using Marten on the Mac. It is then exported as C code and those C source code files are copied over to a Windows 7 machine and added to, or more often overwriting, files in a Visual Studio project. This works because the Marten Engine has been successfully ported to Windows, assembly and all. But since the current Marten IDE is only 32 bit on the Mac, Marten on Windows only supports 32 bit Windows applications. We'll get around to 64 bit someday but to begin with, we wanted a robust generally bug-free engine up and running. To illustrate this process, I have included a couple of screenshots of a basic application up and running on Windows 7 and some of the code that underlies it.

The downside of this approach is that the Marten "debugger" cannot be brought into play and you cannot write or modify code as you execute it. This means that development is done in a more standard link, compile, and debug fashion. Which of course is annoying. Years ago, Jack created a Marten Engine that could communicate with the Marten editor on the Mac using Bonjour. This allowed us to execute and debug code running on the BeOS clone "Haiku OS" while controlling and editing the code on the Mac. To be honest, I am tempted to resurrect that engine and put it to use in this project. We'll see.

Right now it is quite possible to create serious Windows 7 applications with the current state of the application framework (which is called "MW" for Marten Windows). So we are at a point where we can work on the actual IDE code. We plan to use Direct2D drawing for the case windows and perhaps introduce a bit more threading into the mix to investigate the possibility of allowing some simultaneous use of the editor as project applications are running. While the engine is quite stable, the MW framework needs to be fleshed out a bit more before releasing it. If there is interest in trying out the current Windows version, please contact me and we'll see what we can do.

To close, I want to thank everyone who has tried Marten out and learned a bit of Prograph. We will be working on more "Lesson" videos as soon as we can. Next lesson will be on lists, loops, and repeats.

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Windows 7 Application
This Windows 7 application was developed in Prograph created using the Marten IDE. This screenshot shows an example window that contains the basic user interface elements provided by the Win32 API.

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Windows 7 Application Code
This screenshot shows the code for the Create Window class method of the MW List View class. The MW List View class supports the creation of the Windows List View and provides methods for adding and deleting rows.