Developing a Rapid Application Development tool in C

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Hi,

For learning purpose, I am trying to figure out the ways to create a Rapid Application Development tool in C on Windows through Win32 apis.

Purpose of tool:
1. To make the user feel very easy to Create GUI when compared to that of writing 100's of lines of code instead.
eg: Providing Drag and Drop options of windows and enabling re-sizing options etc.,
2. To enable a small scripting mechanism, through which the user can actually handle events of the GUI that he is preparing for.

Now there are two parts in creating the RAD tool and are mentioned as below.

1. Front end part.
2. Back end part.

Front end part: It is the main GUI interface which is very similar to any of the IDEs provided by the C/C++ compiler.

Back end Part: Here I am struck. Once the user prepares his GUI application, I want to know the best ways to make the final executable a stand alone program. I dont know if this is possible at all.

May be i can elaborate a bit more here. Once the user is done with his design of the application through my tool, what are the ways you can suggest me to make the program a stand alone executable.

Please note that I do not want to write a new compiler to convert the User design to machine code through my tool here. But instead i want to make the tool as a scripting utility instead for the user rather than pure low level coding that is done in other languages and which consumes a lot of time.

May be on linux, you can consider the shell scripting utility where the user can end up writing code for his application through various commands embedded in a file and then finally run the shell script at the command prompt.

May be once you review the above and ask me more details about what exactly i am trying to do, i can add more by way of response.

Please suggest.

Posted 4-Jun-12 10:52am

AshakiranBhatter

Updated 4-Jun-12 11:08am

Albert Holguin

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TRK3 · Answer 1 · 2012-06-04T12:16:00

You have basically two choices:

1. Write a compiler
2. Write an interpreter

If you write a compiler, you don't necessarily have to generate machine code, your compiler can generate C or C++ or C# code which is then fed to an an appropriate compiler. Or you can generate java-bytecode and run the thing in the JVM or you can generate CIL and use the CLR.

If you write an interpreter, you'll find that you have to do a lot of the same things you'd have to do to write a compiler.

The advantage of writing a compiler is that testing is often simpler since you just need to examine the output and verify it is what you expected from the input.

Maximilien · Answer 2 · 2012-06-04T13:37:00

Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools usually generate ugly non human readable code that will then be compiled normally by the supporting languages (C, C++, C#, ...).

The difficulty is to match the design aspect (GUI) to the code (matching events, for examples).

The front-end is quite simple (but it is a lot of work), you need to create your UI for everything you want to support (GUI, events, ... ) (have a look at how Visual Studio is working).

The back-end is (can be) quite complex, translating the "design" to workable compilable code; this means manually (via your own code) create the functional code.

for example, if you add a button to a dialog and you want to add an event, you will need to add the code to create the button to the existing dialog (CreateWindow, ...) and add events (for example either via message maps (MFC), or handle events in DlgProc functions, ... )

Visual Studio could be considered a RAD tool, have a look at how it is working:
- The resource editor UI will create a RC file that will be compiled by the resource compiler.
- The different wizard that will add code (classes, methods, variables, events, ... ) to code that will be compiled by the C/C++ compilter.

Good luck.

Developing a Rapid Application Development tool in C

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