Main Page

Overview

• About
• Requirements
• Introduction
• Installation
• How to use this reference? Which structure should I use?
• What you should take care of when using this library!

About

This is the API Reference of the platform independent C/C++ Graphic and GUI Library GrubC (Graphical user interface binding for C/C++).

Introduction

This is the API Reference of the Graphic and GUI Library. In this reference you will find all structures and functions of the library, but you will not need all of these functions. Especially most of the functions in the "jnilib" files are only for developers, who want to extend this library.

In the folder "Related Pages" you can find some tutorials. The soucre of these tutorials can be downloaded here.

Requirements

• JDK 1.5 (Java Developer Kit) installation (JDK 1.4.2 is also working)
• C/C++ IDE with/and C/C++ compiler and linker

Installation

1. Download the library.
2. Extract the files into you project directory.
3. Copy the files "jni.h" and "jni_md.h" from your JDK installation into the "grubc" folder.
4. Add all the files from the lib folder to your project.
5. For compiling see the section "Related Pages".

How to use this reference? Which structure should I use?

To use this reference you have to know what you need. For developing an application with this library you will mainly need the data structures. Of most data structures you find three, which start with the same name:

• The one which ends with "Data" only holds the needed data and is not of interest for you.
• The one which ends with "_" is responsible for C programs. You can see all the functions and their arguments in the documentation of this structure.
• The one which ends with "CPP_" is responsible for C++ programs. You can see nothing really interesting in the documentation of this structure.

In your programs you will use neither of these structures explicitly in your code. You will always use the starting name of these structures.

For example when using the structures Frame_ and FrameCPP_ you will use Frame regardless of using C or C++.

Frame frame;

All of these structures have to be initialized by using their create function. The name of the create function is "create" with the name of the structure appended.

createFrame(&frame);

Note:

The documentation of the functions can not be found in the structure documentation. For the function documentation you have to go to corresponding ".c" file. The functions there have nearly the same names, they only have added the name of the structure in their names.

For example the documentation of the frame functions can be found in the documentation of the "frame.c" file.

What you should take care of when using this library!

The library does not care if you are programming C or C++. When programming C++ you can use the structures like C++ objects.

The library will not work anymore with all IDEs when you mix C and C++ code files and use structures created in the other language. That means, if you create a structure in C++ you can not use in C and the other way round. With some IDEs this will work, because they compile the whole project as either C or C++, but it will not work with all!

More important points:

• When you call a function which returns a pointer to a character array, you have to free it yourself.
• Use the Java types, when calling functions of the library, and not the predefined types (use jint instead of int), because of compatibility reasons. The Java types have the same size on every system.

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