GUIKit Package Tutorial

Wolfram Workbench Support for GUIKit

The Wolfram Workbench is a development environment for Mathematica. Some of its features include the following.

Mathematica editor with syntax highlighting, local variable coloring, mark occurrences, code folding, documentation hovers

Code formatting

Unit testing support for Mathematica, test runner GUI, editor support for writing tests, quick-fixes for editing testing files

Code browsing (find definitions for functions)

Auto-complete for function names, function templates

Quick-fixes for common tasks, such as renaming symbols, creating packages, exporting symbols

Code analysis, checks for problems such as the wrong number of arguments

Full GUI debugger for Mathematica, with code breakpoints, message breakpoints, and symbol breakpoints as well as stack, code, and local variable display

Wizards for creating projects and importing code

Support for profiling, webMathematica, gridMathematica, GUI toolkit, and specialized code searching

The Workbench contains a number of useful features for working with GUIKit. These include creating Mathematica applications that contain GUI definitions and helping you to develop your GUI with debugging tools.

The following shows a GUI application in a project in the Workbench.

Sample GUIKit project shown in the Workbench.

You can add the location of GUIs defined in your application so that when you run your project they can be loaded by commands such as GUIRun or GUIRunModal. This is done with a Workbench project settings inspector that adds the location of GUI definitions from the project to the GUIKit path. This is demonstrated below.

Project settings inspector that adds GUI definitions.

Debugging

When you run your project in a debug mode, you can set breakpoints in script definitions. When you interact with the GUI and reach code that has a breakpoint the Workbench will enter a breakpoint display. This shows you the different stack frames and their source code as well as other useful information such as local variables and their values. In this way you can inspect the state of Mathematica as it runs your GUI, this lets you correct problems and can be very valuable in developing your user interface. A sample of a Workbench debugging session is shown below.

Sample Workbench debugging session for a GUI.