Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Croquet SDK 1.0 and TweakUI on Sophie's XUL.

Krestianstvo - is for those, who want to try Sophie's XUL in describing the Croquet TweakUI's.
Load CroquetSophieXul.mcm from SS sources into Croquet SDK 1.0 or CroquetCollaborative 1.0 through Monticello browser, and extract this archive with system libraries into the Croquet root folder.

It integrates all in one Croquet SDK environment:
1. Freetype fonts and Unicode support (native from Sophie).
Use of any language you want, just point to necessary Freetype font.
2. Rome graphic support (from Rome and Sophie)
3. XUL programming model (native from Sophie)
Design Tweak UI's for Croquet applications in plain XML and CSS files. Create any number of theme designs or unique styles.

Croquet TweakMenuBar is defined using Sophie's XUL

Current Krestianstvo version contains just a base addons for Croquet from Sophie and it's system libraries for Windows/Linux/Mac.
Image (source) includes one example of using XUL in Croquet, showing how to replace the default Tweak menubar in SimpleMasterDemo.

Next Krestianstvo version with Croquet-XUL.
Croquet-XUL will allow to define the pure Croquet(3d/2d) user interfaces or TSpace contents within a xml file, according to the Croquet software logic requirements.

An example setup of XUL ui (XulMenuBar class)
---------------------
createFromXul
|app|
app := MenuXulApplication new.
app setupFromXMLFile: (FileDirectory pathFromURI: 'resources/menu.xml') styleSheetFile: (FileDirectory pathFromURI: 'resources/menu.css') for: self.
app application: self.
^app widgets at:#main
---------------------
it returns the instance of CMenuBar, according to menu.xml and menu.css files descriptions.