DSDP-NAB Project Plan

Release Schedule

Our first official release of the Native Application Builder Project are listed below.

• Milestone 1 - end of June 2006
  

Background

The NAB project was born from WideStudio/MWT, it is a open source software of multi-platform GUI tools. That is mostly used for making a desktop GUI application on a PC by individuals and professional developer. And another major usage is for building and running GUIs on embedded devices, it is used by embedded device software engineers.

WideStudio/MWT is composed by 2 part, one is a original visual GUI application builder that we port (It seems like as a VE), and other one is multi-platform GUI library called MWT (Multiplatform Widget Tookit).

MWT is a light weight GUI library but it have a variety of GUI parts from simple buttons to complex tree list. And it have non-GUI parts such as event handling, threading/synchronization, Client-Server functions for remote computing and so on. Once, if GUI application was developed on the MWT library, it is possible to run on the other platforms (such as Win32, a Linux/X-window, ITron and so on) only by compiling again because there is interchangeability of the source code.

This NAB project started at WideStudio/MWT. But it aim for an extensible framework for various tools.

	Supported Platforms of MWT
	X11
	Linux + DirectFB
	Linux /dev/fb
	mu-CLinux /dev/fb
	ZAURUS (Frame Buffer)
	Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP
	WindowsCE
	MacOSX native
	Standard T-Engine ARM / SH / MIPS(T-Shell)
	Standard T-Engine ARM / SH / MIPS(FrameBuffer)
	ITRON (Frame Buffer)
	BTRON/Cho-Kanji

Please see the following WEB sites for more details of WideStudio/MWT.
English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese

Architecture

We have a tentative architecture plan which is "Framework and example Tool" model.

NAB stand on the two frameworks there are NAEF (Native Application Editor Framework) and NCGF (Native Code Generation Framework). NAEF have the functions for visual editing an application which is builded on the NTK (Native Tool Kit). NCGF cooperate with NAEF for driving a NCG (Native Code Generator). And NAB is a tool implementation part. We make a MWTAB (MWT Application builder) as example.

NAB arcitecture

Functions

The example application MWTAB provides the function to make GUI application in the WYSIWYG using the MWT library, it is equal to original WideStudio Application Builder. The Functions are below.

• GUI Edit Function
  MWT application are generated as well as the VE plug-in for the Java language, and can visually arrange, edit, and the source code be generated. Various GUI parts can be arranged with the mouse to build the application window, and attributes of parts can be specified visually.

• C/C++ Source Code Generation and Edit Function
  Event procedures of each MWT parts are generated automatically. Moreover, the program can be adding described at each event processing.

• Application Build/Execution Function
  The source code can be compiled and an executable application can be generated. Moreover, the application can be executed in the Eclipse environment.

The MWTAB needs 2 other parts, one is CDT and another one is MWT library plug-ins distributing from WideStudio.org. That includes MWT binary libraries (MWT, MWTBI and MWTCG) and their very thin Java wrapper.

screen shot of the MWTAB Beta