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:

brew install wxwidgets

You can alternatively run this command with the HEAD flag to install the latest development release:

brew install wxwidgets --HEAD

On Windows, you can use chocolatey to install wxWidgets:

choco 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:

ondesked program.xml

As you can guess, here's the format of the command:

ondesked file_path

Where file_path will be replaced by the file path.

You can also have complex path like this:

ondesked dog/cat/mouse.xml

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:

wx-config --libs --cxxflags

Let's embed it in the command of our desired compiler, like this:

g++ `wx-config --libs --cxxflags` *.cpp -o main

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.