Ultimate++ is an attempt to provide the optimal desktop application development platform for Windows and POSIX/X11 platforms. Ultimate++ is aggressively using C++ features to achieve this goal, exploiting a couple of new ideas in application development. Ultimate++ consists of a set of C++ libraries and a development environment, TheIDE. While TheIDE is closely related to Ultimate++, it provides a good environment even for non-U++ based development as well, so even when you are not interested in Ultimate++ way of programming, you still might be interested in TheIDE.

Wetting your taste

Ultimate++ promises radical reduction of code complexity of typical desktop applications. Let us start with a simple example â?? an application that displays the number of days between two dates. The number of days is refreshed as user types or edits dates into the input fields (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Days example application

The application window layout is created using Ultimate++ visual designer (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Days application layout being visually designed

The actual code for the application can be seen in Listing 1.

Listing 1. Complete source code for Days example

 
 
#include <CtrlLib/CtrlLib.h>
 
#define LAYOUTFILE <Days/Days.lay>
#include <CtrlCore/lay.h>
 
class Days : public WithDaysLayout<TopWindow> {
public:
   void Compute();
 
   typedef Days CLASSNAME;
   Days();
};
 
void Days::Compute()
{
   result = IsNull(date1) || IsNull(date2) ? "" :
         Format("There is %d day(s) between %` and %`",
               abs(Date(~date1) - Date(~date2)), ~date1, ~date2);
}
 
Days::Days()
{
   CtrlLayout(*this, "Days");
   date1 <<= THISBACK(Compute);
   date2 <<= THISBACK(Compute);
   Compute();
}
 
GUI_APP_MAIN
{
   Days().Run();
}