{"id":2765,"date":"2022-04-17T09:31:56","date_gmt":"2022-04-17T04:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rangakrish.com\/?p=2765"},"modified":"2022-04-17T09:37:51","modified_gmt":"2022-04-17T04:07:51","slug":"calling-lisp-functions-from-xojo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rangakrish.com\/index.php\/2022\/04\/17\/calling-lisp-functions-from-xojo\/","title":{"rendered":"Calling Lisp Functions from Xojo"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few days ago, I purchased Xojo Pro<\/strong><\/em> commercial license. In case you haven’t heard about the product, Xojo<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u00a0is a popular cross-platform development tool targeting Desktop<\/strong><\/em>, Web<\/strong><\/em> and iOS<\/strong><\/em> (Android<\/strong><\/em> is expected in the near future). It supports an Object-Oriented Basic<\/strong><\/em> language. It has been around for over 25 years and has been steadily gaining wider adoption among developer community.<\/p>\n

I am a long-term user of RAD Studio<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u00a0from Embarcadero<\/strong><\/em>, but I am always on the lookout for alternative tools, and Xojo<\/strong><\/em> satisfied my requirements. In fact, I have been playing with it for the past few days and I am quite pleased with what it offers.<\/p>\n

One of the things that caught my attention was the ease with which functions defined in external libraries, for example DLLs<\/strong><\/em> in Windows<\/strong><\/em>, could be easily called from the Xojo Basic<\/strong><\/em> language. This is a fundamental requirement for any extensible platform. I wanted to test this feature by calling a couple of Lisp<\/strong><\/em> functions defined in a DLL<\/strong><\/em>. The rest of this article covers the details.<\/p>\n

Here is the Lisp<\/strong><\/em> code that has been converted into a DLL<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Lisp Code<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The functions “randomInt”<\/strong><\/em> and “fibonacci”<\/strong><\/em> are exported from the DLL<\/strong><\/em>. Both the functions take an “Int64”<\/strong><\/em> argument and return an “Int64”<\/strong><\/em> value. I used Lispworks Enterprise Edition 8.0<\/strong><\/em><\/a> (64 bit version for Windows<\/strong><\/em> 10) to build the DLL<\/strong><\/em>. The Lisp<\/strong><\/em> script to generate the DLL<\/strong><\/em> is shown below:<\/p>\n

\"Generating<\/a>
Generating the DLL<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now, moving on to Xojo<\/strong><\/em>, I created a simple Desktop<\/strong><\/em> App (Windows<\/strong><\/em>, 64 bit). Here is the design view:<\/p>\n

\"Xojo<\/a>
Xojo App Design View<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nothing fancy here. There are two edit fields to enter integers. When the “Randomize”<\/strong><\/em> button is pressed, the “randomInt”<\/strong> Lisp<\/strong><\/em> function wil be called and the result will be displayed in the text field below. Likewise, when th “Fibonacci”<\/strong><\/em> button is pressed, the corresponding Lisp<\/strong><\/em> function “fibonacci”<\/strong><\/em> will be called and the result shown.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The overall Project<\/strong><\/em> structure is as shown below:<\/p>\n

\"Project<\/a>
Project View<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Let us now look at the actual code corresponding to the Button<\/strong> “Pressed”<\/strong><\/em> handlers. The first one is for the “Randomize”<\/strong><\/em> button:<\/p>\n

\"Randomize<\/a>
Randomize Button Handler<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Since our Lisp DLL<\/strong><\/em> will work only under Windows<\/strong><\/em> 64 bit, I am checking for the correct environment before executing the code. Calling the DLL<\/strong><\/em> function is made possible by the “Declare Function”<\/strong><\/em> statement. The rest of the code is pretty straightforward.<\/p>\n

Here is the action handler for the “Fibonacci”<\/strong><\/em> button:<\/p>\n

\"Fibonacci<\/a>
Fibonacci Button Handler<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is nothing else to do in the project. Let us “Build”<\/strong><\/em> the project now. Xojo<\/strong><\/em> takes a couple of seconds to generate the relevant files.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The executable file is called “CallingLisp.exe”<\/strong><\/em>. We are not ready to run the program yet. Remember, we have our “foreign”<\/strong><\/em> code in a DLL<\/strong><\/em>. This DLL<\/strong><\/em> must be in the “Path”<\/strong><\/em> when we run our program. To keep things simple, I copied my DLL<\/strong><\/em> into the same directory as the EXE<\/strong><\/em> file:<\/p>\n

\"Generated<\/a>
Generated Files<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The above shows all the files generated by Xojo<\/strong><\/em> compiler, along with the DLL<\/strong><\/em> I added.<\/p>\n

Let us run our program by double-clicking “CallingLisp.exe”<\/strong><\/em>. I enter two integers in the input fields and click the respective buttons. The following shows the output:<\/p>\n

\"Running<\/a>
Running the Program<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The good news is that Xojo<\/strong><\/em> code has successfully called my Lisp<\/strong><\/em> functions to calculate the outputs displayed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I quit the App<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0and run it again.<\/p>\n

\"Another<\/a>
Another Run of the Program<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So, our program works perfectly!\u00a0Of course, this is a “toy”<\/strong><\/em> application and hence\u00a0<\/span>there is nothing to brag about it.<\/p>\n

What is nice is that Xojo<\/strong><\/em> makes it possible (and easy) to call “foreign”<\/strong><\/em> functions from existing libraries, thus making code reuse possible. And even for a newbie<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0like me, this didn’t take much effort! Over the next few weeks, I will be spending more time on Xojo<\/strong><\/em>. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n

Feel free to download<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u00a0the Project<\/strong><\/em> file and related resources.<\/p>\n

Have a nice weekend!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few days ago, I purchased Xojo Pro commercial license. In case you haven’t heard about the product, Xojo\u00a0is a popular cross-platform development tool targeting Desktop, Web and iOS (Android is expected in the near future). It supports an Object-Oriented Basic language. It has been around for over 25 years and has been steadily gaining […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18,17,318],"tags":[303,319],"class_list":["post-2765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lisp","category-programming","category-xojo","tag-lisp-dll","tag-xojo"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9OLnF-IB","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3050,"url":"https:\/\/www.rangakrish.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/16\/building-a-xojo-app-to-interact-with-openai-api\/","url_meta":{"origin":2765,"position":0},"title":"Building a Xojo App to Interact with OpenAI API","author":"admin","date":"March 16, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"A few weeks ago I registered with OpenAI to access its services through API and created a secret Key for my use. 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Languages such as C++, Java, Go and Node.js are commonly used\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Book Review"","block_context":{"text":"Book Review","link":"https:\/\/www.rangakrish.com\/index.php\/category\/book-review\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rangakrish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Blockchain-Book-300x251.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":70,"url":"https:\/\/www.rangakrish.com\/index.php\/2015\/11\/13\/aspect-oriented-programming-and-lisp\/","url_meta":{"origin":2765,"position":4},"title":"Aspect-Oriented Programming and Lisp","author":"admin","date":"November 13, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a popular approach to handle cross-cutting concerns in an application. Common examples of cross-cutting functionality are Logging, Error Handling and Transaction Management. AspectJ\u00a0is the original AOP extension created for Java in 2001.\u00a0AOP extensions have been developed\u00a0for some\u00a0other languages also. 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