XPCE is a toolkit for the development of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). XPCE aims at the rapid development of fast and well-structured GUIs that are portable accross UNIX/X11 and Windows (Windows-NT/2000/XP/Vista). It achieves these goals by providing a high level of abstraction for specifying the GUI, a smooth integration with Prolog and a set of development tools for browsing the class- and object-world, with constant access to the documentation and your source-code.

XPCE provides for two complementary ways of programming. The built-in and library classes may simply be used from your Prolog code, or new XPCE classes can be defined in Prolog using natural Prolog syntax. The first is often used to `do something small', while the latter provides excellent structuring for large graphical applications.

Prolog and graphics

Prolog is normally associated with AI, natural language processing, databases and similar tasks. Interactive programs may have subtasks for which Prolog is `the tool-to-use'. Such applications are often implemented in other languages and Prolog is used as an embedded engine to deal with these tasks.

Prolog is very suitable for building graphical applications. Its powerful meta-programming capabilities allow for clear and concise declarations of properties and dependencies in the application. Its interactive development environment allows for fast prototyping while the application is running and its automatic data and memory management makes development fast and reliable.

The two most important drawbacks of Prolog, speed and relatively large footprint and startup time of very small applications do not matter for interactive applications!

Alternatives for Graphics in Prolog

A couple of approaches have been taken to arrive at graphical applications that include Prolog. We will review them below.

Embedding

Since quite some time, Prolog implementations provide powerful interfaces to C and mechanisms to embed the Prolog system in an application written in another language. The advantage of this approach is freedom of choice for your GUI platform. Disadvantage is that debugging and developing the hybrid environment is generally cumbersome, and you lose many the advantages of Prolog as a GUI language outlined above.

Using a Prolog with built-in graphics

Various Prolog implementations that originate from the PC or Mac world provide graphical primitives. They are generally non-portable.

Window-system API

In this approach, the C-API from the window-system is provided from Prolog with minimal changes. ProXt, distributed with Quintus Prolog, is an example of this approach. Advantages are that C-programmers with experience with the API have no trouble using it. The resulting GUI can be fully compliant to the platform standards. Disadvantages are the generally low-level of abstraction, while Prolog is not the most suitable language to add the very CPU-intensive graphics manipulations required by some applications. APIs designed for C generally do not provide sufficient data integrity to allow for complicated modifications at runtime or handling `retry' or `abort' from Prolog. Finally, the result is not portable.

External GUI languages

Another common approach is to use an external GUI language such as Tcl/Tk, and connect the interface to Prolog using pipes. Advantages and disadvantages are similar to `Embedding'. Intensive communication between the GUI and Prolog application can cause poor performance.

XPCE

The dynamic object-system of XPCE provides the ideal platform. It guarantees an acceptable level of integrity at the data level to allow for interactive development many Prolog users like so much. It provides object-oriented programming using a natural syntax from Prolog, which is very suitable for implementing large GUIs. The tight integration ensures good performance and finally, abstraction over the native Window-system API provides applications that are fully portable between UNIX and PCs.