ANN: Gtk+HS 0.11.5

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

I am pleased to announce version 0.11.5 of Gtk+HS, the
Haskell binding for the GUI toolkit GTK+.  This is the first
beta release and the first release that comes with pre-build
binaries.  The binding is not complete yet, but it is
sufficient for applications with GUIs of medium complexity.

The underlying toolkit, GTK+, implements a mature, high-end
widget set, which forms the basis of the Gnome desktop
environment, and is used in cutting edge open source
applications, such as the Gimp, Gnumeric, and Abiword.
Gnome (and, thus, GTK+) is not only one of the two main
desktop environments for Linux, but has also been selected
by Sun as the new standard desktop for Solaris.  Moreover,
there is a port of GTK+ available for Win32.

The present distribution includes an example application
(The Boolean Editor) that demonstrates how GTK+ can be used
from Haskell.  It illustrates concepts, such as callbacks,
the handling of global GUI state, and synchronisation
between the different windows of an application.  The code
is available directly from the Web page without need to
download the complete release.

Portability: I tested this release with GHC on GNU/Linux;
however, it should work equally well on any other Unix
platform that is supported by GHC.  Moreover, it should,
after some fiddling with makefiles, also work with NHC98,
but I haven't got around to testing that yet.  With the GTK+
port for Windows, Gtk+HS should in principle also be usable
on Windows.  I am not keen on trying the latter myself, but
I would welcome any patches that are necessary to make it
work.

Gtk+HS includes code contributions from a number of people.
See <http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gtk%2bhs/AUTHORS> for
details. 

More information (including screenshots!) as well as source
and binary packages are available from

  http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/gtk/

Happy Hacking!
Manuel