[Haskell-cafe] ANN: wxHaskell 0.11.1

[Jeremy O'Donoghue]

The wxHaskell development team is pleased to announce the release of
wxHaskell 0.11.1, a Haskell binding for the wxWidgets GUI library.

The Haskell support is built on a reasonably complete C language
binding, which could be used as the basis for wxWidgets support on other
languages/platforms which do not have easy mechanisms for linking with
C++ code.

The main highlights of wxHaskell 0.11.1 are: 

- Support for XRC resource files, allowing GUI design using a visual
tool. Note that this
   is currently not type safe, and programs will crash if a widget is
   not cast to the correct
   type on loading.
- Support for wxWidgets 2.8.x. Support for wxWidgets 2.4.2 is now
dropped and wxHaskell
   will not compile against versions of wxWidgets prior to 2.6. This
   means that exploratory
   development using GHCi is no longer possible. Workaround is to
   continue to use older
   wxHaskell versions.
- Support for GHC 6.10
- Preliminary support for Cabal / Hackage

The full list of changes is provided at the end of this mail.

Binary packages are available from the wxHaskell download site at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=73133, for the
following platforms:

- Windows
- OS X (Intel platform only)
- Source code .tar.gz and .zip
- Documentation (cross-platform)

The wxHaskell libraries (wxcore and wx) are also available from Hackage
(http://hackage.haskell.org).

About wxHaskell
---------------

wxHaskell is a Haskell binding to the wxWidgets GUI library for recent
versions
of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. It provides a native look and feel on
Windows,
OS X and Linux, and a medium level programming interface.

The main project page for wxHaskell is at
http://wxhaskell.sourceforge.net.
The latest source code for wxHaskell can always be obtained from
http://darcs.haskell.org/wxhaskell.
There are developer (wxhaskell-devel at lists.sourceforge.net and user
(wxhaskell-users at lists.sourceforge.net) mailing lists, and a wiki page
at http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/WxHaskell which can provide more
information to those interested.

The C language binding for wxHaskell was derived from an original C
language binding created for the Eiffel programming language by the
ELJ project (http://elj.sourceforge.net).

Non backward compatible changes:
- Preliminary Cabal / Hackage support
- Added "--global" argument to configure script
- Added "--user" argument to configure script
- Changed wxhaskell official web page to Haskell wiki at
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/WxHaskell
- Changed official darcs repository to code.haskell.org
- Adapted the wxHaskell C-layer to work with wxWidgets 2.8
- Adapted some part of wxcore API to be able to refer to wxWidgets 2.8
documentation for wxcore functions
- Added "TopLevelWindow", which mainly removes some functionality from
"Frame"
- Changed "--with-stc" argument to "--with-contrib"
- Removed "Wave" type synonym

Backward compatible additions:
- Added support for using XRC resource files to load most controls and
menus attached to frames.
- Added sample file showing how to use XRC support to attach command
handlers to menu items
- Added sample file showing how to use properties with many controls.
- Added "--enable-optimization" argument to configure script
- Added "--O*" argument to configure script
- Added "--enable-library-profiling" argument to configure script
- Added "--p" argument to configure script
- Added "-fvia-C" argument to configure script. And moved this 
compilation flag to configure script
- Added Image / ByteString conversion functions
- Adapted the configuration  to work with GHC 6.10.
- Changed "Var" type synonym from "IORef" to stm's "TVar" for thread
safety
- Changed "imageGetPixelArray" and "imageCreateFromPixelArray" to be
more flexible.
- Changed "Point", "Size", "Vector" and "Rect" to be type synonym. 
- Added "wxcMilliSleep". Now, "wxcAppUSleep" is deprecated. Use
"wxcMilliSleep" instead
- Added very experimental wxGraphicsContext support
- Added wxSVGFileDC functions

Bugfixes:
- Applied DEPRECATED pragma to old deprecated functions. Just documented
in Haddock before.
- Fixed "processExecAsync" hangs Windows GUI-only program
- Fixed Windows binary install problem when path with spaces (bug
1400488)
- Probably fixed the applicattion failed to initialize properly when 
  using Windows binary.

-- 
  Jeremy O'Donoghue
  jeremy.odonoghue at gmail.com
-- 
  Jeremy O'Donoghue
  jeremy.odonoghue at gmail.com