Fenestra User's Guide -- contents | next
Draft
Franck Arnaud
Copyright (c) 1997 Franck Arnaud, England E.U.
This manual is the user's guide to Fenestra, a Graphical User Interface library in Eiffel for platforms using the Win32 API. This text can be used in association with the reference manual Available as a Windows help file in the distribution. which includes flat-short forms of all the public classes in the library.
A set of public interfaces is not enough to describe the context in which classes are to be used, the relations between them, and the rationale behind the design. This is the role of this manual to describe the structure of the library and the capabilities of its classes, while the reference manual can be used during actual development to check the signatures of methods, their associated contracts, and similar reference information which has been left out of this guide.
This manual, while assuming a knowledge of the Eiffel language and method, and what the Windows user interface looks like, does not require a prior experience of GUI programming in general, or the Windows API and associated tools in particular.
A tutorial chapter presents a small but complete application introducing most of the library idioms. It is essential because the remaining material includes only necessary examples -- most library usage patterns are either trivial or already exemplified in the tutorial.
Chapter (see section 2) is a review of the overall layout of the library and some other general issues, and it should be read before the remaining chapters, which describe the functionality covered by the library's individual clusters, and are thus reasonably self-contained.
In addition, some appendices cover side issues like portability and the low-level runtime. Appendix (see section A) is particularly important and it may be useful to read it beforehand. It documents the conventions used in the library's Eiffel texts, and it may help the understanding of the flat-short forms in the reference manual.