Author: Heiko Mikala
Date: 16:13:01 02/25/00
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On February 23, 2000 at 23:36:30, John Coffey wrote: >I have some MFC experience but probably not enough to slap an interface together >really quickly. Somebody told me that Visual BASIC is a fast way to write >interfaces, but I don't know. (I used VB 1.0 like 10 years ago and haven't >touched it since.) > >I have never used JAVA, but wondered if it might be a fast way to put together >an interface and if it can link to C programs? To build good user interfaces using Java you would have to use Java's class library "Swing". To build such interfaces by hand is not completely trivial, because you have to take care about platform-independence of the look of the interface. Maybe you could try JBuilder Foundation, as someone else suggested already, which includes a visual designer to design interfaces using drag and drop techniques. I haven't tried this yet though, I prefer to do everything by hand ;-) Concerning your second question: no, it's not possible to link Java and C into one single program. But you could for example make your own engine Winboard-compatible and implement the basic Winboard commands in your user-interface so that you could run your chess program as an engine in you interface. The nice side-effect would be, that all the other winboard-engines would run in your interface too :-) In fact I've been thinking about doing exactly that too. The only reason that speaks against Java in this case is it's garbage collector. If you use a user interface to run tournaments between two or more engines for example, it would be crucial to give all engines the same amount of processor time. But if Java at some point (and you don't know when in advance) starts its garbage collector, this would steal processor time from the currently running engine. I'm not sure, if there is a way to switch off the garbage collector at least for some amount of time. I already wrote a (very) small Java-program that implemented only the most important Winboard commands and was able to start two engines and let them play a match against each other. It worked fine and it was fun to watch :) The garbage collector thing made me stop the experiment though, at least for a while. I may return to this project, since I really would like to write a nice GUI for my chess program. Greetings, Heiko.
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