Fundamentals of Reaction

Is there somewhere where you can read up on the basic fundamentals behind Reaction and how to use it?

Any books? Online guides?

Trying to get some ground up understanding of it before I dive into these seemingly endless tag lists.

@orgin

With google translate you can read part of my guide:

http://74.125.43.132/translate_c?hl=i ... kba0l1I-u-a7h6RfJIzNoVsJw

Original language:

http://shinkuro.altervista.org/amiga/guida/CAP_4.txt

@ShInKurO

Quote:

Unfortunately the translation isn't good enough to make your guide usable. A lot of it remains untranslated.

I'm interested in this too, so I hope that there's an English guide around somewhere.

Hans

@orgin

Reaction being based upon BOOPSI maybe this link might help :
http://www.flux.utah.edu/~stack/boopsi.html (even if it's a bit outdated)

@orgin

There isn't much documentation available. The SDK documents all the classes and provides a few simple examples of how to use reaction objects. What it still doesn't do is tell you which of the base class attributes are overridden \ supported so that's just trial an error.

The RKMs have details of how gadgetclass, imageclass, icclass etc. work and provide examples but don't document the additional methods\attributes that Reaction provides.

If you are writing classes (not for the faint hearted), you will need to read gadget_gc.doc (now included in the SDK autodocs).

I'd also recommend reading the MUI documentation - MUI and Reaction are pretty much the same thing and work in pretty much the same way.

@ShInKurO
If you have to much time on your hands how about a little translation over the weekend

I'm sure many would appreciate it and it would be great to have some description and basics explained in English.

@Troels

Tad:

http://tadlabs.wordpress.com/

is working on translation, if you want give an hand please write to him ;)

@orgin
The so-called "ReAction" doesn't really exist any longer. It is all just the standard AmigaOS GUI system.

What you want to learn about is BOOPSI. This is convered in depth in the RKRMs which you can get legally from the AmigaDev CD 2.1 from AmigaKit.

What ReAction is/was is ClassAct which was merged into AmigaOS. ClassAct as you know is just a collection of BOOPSI classes. The complete class diagram is available in intuition.doc.

That said, window.class and layout.gadget made it possible for the old ClassAct to do many things without changes to intuition.library. Being 3rd party, they had to. Now that ClassAct turned into ReAction and has had time to merge into intuition.library it really isn't an independent component any longer but you still have a parallel system of sorts.

GUIs made with window.class and layout.gadget can be considered to be "ReAction" GUIs these days but the BOOPSI classes are interchangeable to some degree so you can stick a button.gadget in an ordinary Window for example. The GUI prefs system covers all BOOPSI classes as well so there is no need for independent prefs programs. Expect even more integration as time goes on.

The easiest way to create a standard AmigaOS GUI is to use window.class as your base. Build your GUI from there and you reap the benefits of a lot of common code. Otherwise, you get to fight it out with a standard Window and a rather complex input event system.

You may have noticed the autodocs have been updated to a large extent in an attempt to make it easier to understand. Alas, the examples are still the best way to learn how to use the GUI system until an updated RKRM or sorts appears. There is also a lot of info. from the old RKRMs that have been integrated into the root_cl.doc, ic_cl.doc, model_cl.doc, image_ic.doc and gadget_gc.doc autodocs.

Learn BOOPSI first and then learn how to use window.class and layout.gadget second. The rest will follow I hope.

Btw there is introduction guide on os4depot.net for amiga os 4.0 it is simple and gives you an idea of what is reaction

It is called reaction guide :

http://www.os4depot.net/index.php?fun ... lopment/reactionguide.lha

@all

Thanks everyone, you gave me enough information for implementing column sorting in the file lister project on openamiga :)

Now if I could just find more devs to work on it ...