ObjectGEM (OGEM) is an object-oriented framework (a collection of "unit"s or modules) for Pure Pascal on Atari TOS/GEM systems for GUI applications including their complete workflow (lifecycle). It offers pre-built, extensible components like menus and toolbars, modal and non-modal alert boxes and (tabbed) dialogs, easy handling of shortcuts (hotkeys), context sensitive help and integration of other applications via system messages (using the OLGA protocol, for example).
The framework was heavily inspired by the Object Windows Library. I built ObjectGEM mainly to facilitate the development of my spreadsheet application Texel, but it is used in some other GEM applications as well.
ObjectGEM was developed and maintained from 1992 to 1999. Some milestones:
- 1.00 (1993-04-28)
- 1.10 (1994-03-03)
- 1.20 (1994-10-29). This was the latest "stable" version.
- 1.50 was "work in progress" over many years. I released beta versions from time to time; the latest "official" beta version dates back to 1999-03.05. Afterwards, there were only minor changes on 1999-04-29 which I released as recently as 2020, when I uploaded all the sources to GitHub.
There have been reviews of ObjectGEM in some magazines:
- ST Magazin 7/93 (p. 22 ff.) by Christoph Bartholme (in German)
- Atari Computing #12 (2/99, p. 37) by Mark Wherry (in English)
This source code is completely out of date. It is provided as-is without any warranty.
I publish the source files for historical / archaeological reasons only, for informational purposes. The code is not intended to be used anymore, especially not as a template for new code.
Some parts of the code (some names, most comments) and all of the documentation are in German only. Sorry for that.
Apart from that:
Have fun! :-)
Thomas
@thmuch