Getting Started
By the end of this guide, you should be ready to craft apps with Ondesked.
Installing wxWidgets
Ondesked compiles to C++, which requires the GUI toolkit - wxWidgets - to work.
Make sure you install wxWidgets before you start using Ondesked. Here's the official download page. Moreover, the official wiki features guides for installation.
It is recommended to use package managers whereas possible. In macOS, you can use homebrew. Run the following command for the latest stable release:
You can alternatively run this command with the HEAD
flag to install the latest development release:
On Windows, you can use chocolatey to install wxWidgets:
For Linux, it's recommended to follow the official installation guides of wxWidgets.
Installing Ondesked
Will be updated later.
Compiling Ondesked Code
Let's assume that we're in a directory with an Ondesked document called program.xml
From the terminal/command prompt, we can run this command to compile it:
As you can guess, here's the format of the command:
Where file_path
will be replaced by the file path.
You can also have complex path like this:
This will compile the Ondesked document mouse.xml
, which is inside the directory named cat
, which in turn is inside the directory named dog
.
After compilation, a new directory will be created, with name derived from the file name of the Ondesked document. For example, if the file name was program.xml
, the directory will be called program
.
Inside the newly created directory, you should have several files, representing a C++ app. Compiling the C++ code will build the app. We'll look into it in the next heading.
Compiling the Generated C++ App
Ondesked code will always compile to C++. We need to compile the C++ code with headers, libraries, etc of wxWidgets provided to the compiler.
The easiest way to do so is to use the program wx-config
which should come with wxWidgets. wx-config
will output the options and flags that needs to be passed to the compiler so you don't have to worry about it at all.
For example, this command will output all the flags and libraries of wxWidgets:
Let's embed it in the command of our desired compiler, like this:
Here, we're using g++ (with wx-config output) which will compile any C++ file (*.cpp) and output the executable as "main."
This should build the C++ code, and make the standalone executable GUI app, which is the end product.
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