Overview

This book will teach you how to use the M Windowing Application Programmer Interface (MWAPI) to develop standard windows applications. The MWAPI is an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) extension of the M language designed for the development of Graphical User Interface (GUI) applications. The specification defines syntax and methods for creating applications that take advantage of windowing environments and provides support for legacy code through terminal emulation. The MWAPI eliminates the need for an in-depth knowledge of any particular target platform by providing a platform-independent development environment where applications may be freely ported among windowing systems without source code modification. Regardless of the host platform, the look-and-feel characteristics are maintained by abstracting these attributes into a standard set of syntax and methods. If the reader wants a book that provides the in-depth coverage necessary to develop powerful applications using a standard approach, this is it.

The MWAPI's high-level approach shields the developer from the lower-level operations of any particular windowing platform while retaining the functionality permitted of any other application running in the environment. The MWAPI uses a natural hierarchical syntax of Structured System Variable Names (SSVN) to maintain the definitions of windowing objects. Creating objects is as simple as assigning values to these SSVNs. It is much easier to use a familiar syntax and a few commands than to work with the numerous function calls of typical windowing APIs to accomplish the same task.

The MWAPI's approach to detecting and processing user interactions with graphical objects differs...