Writing Explorer application with EZY Prolog

Designing user interface-> Writing File Explorer using EZY Prolog EZY Prolog console

Every programming language tutorial starts with "Hello World" sample. But once you pass this stage and confident that it is possible, you will start looking into ways how to write something useful.

It is hard to imagine modern program without rich user interface and modern version of "Hello world" should include graphical user interface.

I think that various Explorers (or Explorer-style applications) could represent modern version of "Hello World".

Explorer-style application usually consist of 3 major parts:

Search panel with category tree
Search results panel
Operational panel

Explorer-style application are not limited by well known examples, such as:

Windows file explorer
MS Outlook
MS Management console

You can consider EZY Designer as explorer-style application as well - it explorers GUI declarations and provides interactive access to the components and their properties.

These applications have similar GUI components, such as tree view of categories, grid with search results and operational panel, where user works with individual items of the search result.

These applications also have similar interaction profile - the way user interacts with software:

Search in category tree
Selection of the individual item in search results
Processing of individual item

Search stage.

Interaction usually starts with exploration of the category tree (directories in case of windows file explorer, folders in case of Outlook).

Once necessary category is located, user performs an action (usually double click on selected item) to display result list (list of files or e-mail) in result panel (which is usually is displayed in form of a grid).

Selection stage.

User selects element from result panel and software displays item details in operational panel.

Details retrieval stage.

Here user views or edits individual properties of found element.

EZY Prolog has full set of components and tools, which allows programmer to build explorer-style applications:

Tree view GUI component with user-definable reactors
Grid view GUI component with user-definable reactors
Editing components (text entry field, text editor) with user-definable event handler.
Standard Windows active elements (such as push buttons, list boxes) with user-definable event handler.
GUI frames (to group elements) with slide bar (separator) for convenient resize of interface elements.

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