Hi all, I was wanting to create a dialog box in a (predominantly command-line) application where the action of the user on the dialog box is returned to the code that requested the dialog so we can branch based on the selection. It seems the most natural way of doing this in a functional language is to block until the dialog box is closed and then return a value, rather than messing with mutable state. This fits in well with what I want to happen in my program.
I can do this quite easily with a JOptionPane, which has the right semantics for me, and can return a single value to indicate what option was chosen. So far so good. However, if I want more control over the layout and content of the dialog, I seem to be best served by building it myself out of a JDIalog [1]. I've got code that creates the JDialog and then blocks until it is closed, which I can control with a button and an ActionListener in the obvious way. However, the snag is that it doesn't return the outcome. The interface of JDialog seems to be built around the idea of having mutable objects and state, and having an action listener that can mutate the object and a getter method to find the value assigned in the listener. I imagine I can get round this by writing a thin wrapper for the JDialog that will handle the state in Java, but is there a pure Clojure way to do this kind of thing? [2] If not, is this (unlikely) a general problem with GUI programming in functional languages or (most likely, I assume) a paradigm mismatch between Swing and functional languages. If the latter, would the Clojure community be well-served by a standard library of shims for making Swing fit better into the functional mould? Tim [1] My experience of Swing is minimal, so I'm ready to be corrected if this turns out to be terribly naive. [2] Aside from unscalable hacks like having a package-level mutable ref that can be updated from within a listener --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
