Voice of the PPL

Here is the new (big) feature that PPL 2.0 will inherit. Visual programming using your mouse, dragging icons and changing values using the Inspector. How can it be easier? I don’t know!

The nice thing about this new visual programming concept is that it allow you to see your code right from the project window in a nice structured display.

If you drag a new component (class) to the code, it will automatically create an instance of the class (a new object) on which you can change the properties, even add events from within the visual code. If you drag an object that is already created elsewhere, you will get a nice popup list on screen with all possible public properties and methods you can access and call for this object, once selected the appropriate visual code will be inserted.

If you want to manually add code to the visual code section, just drag a PLibrary object and you will be able to insert manual code lines directly inside the visual code section.

Here is a screenshot of a simple OnClick event for a button on a form.

What kind of PPL code will this generate when you compile your project?

Now let’s see how you can easily change parameters for a function and select variables from a list:

Now, let’s review the list of available components for visual programming. (This list is very small since we are early in development, some more statements will be added).

Now, lets see from a more complex sample, what is possible with the new visual programming:

How about adding any available function or procedure call directly in the visual code section? Simply press Ctrl+T to add something using tags, the tagging system in the PIDE 2.0 is very advanced and support typing complete sentences to locate a component, function, procedure, property, method, etc…

So I hope you guys will enjoy using this (optional) code editing feature in the new PPL 2.0.