Keeping the Codebase Together

We have to generate the following things from our OCaml codebase:

(a) Command Line PDF Tools for Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris, demo and full versions
(b) .NET DLL by compiling with F#, demo and full versions
(c) The open-source CamlPDF library
(d) The demonstration renderer and its GUI
(e) Literate Programs for all the code

So far all this has been achieved with just plain Ocaml and a couple of makefiles and the very useful OCamlMakefile. A little trickery is required to have demo and full versions compiled from the same source.

Soon we’ll add:

(f) Plain C Wrapper for the same library exposed to .NET

which will allow the PDF library to work natively from C on any platform where OCaml can natively compile. This wrapper will be a little harder to write than the .NET wrapper, since we have less rich types available to express the various ML data structures.

I’ve also been playing with Apple’s Cocoa with Objective-C, in preparation for a new PDF-related product for OS X. I’ll be linking in the new Plain C wrapper to that. Cocoa and Objective C is all object-oriented-kool-aid, but seemingly of the less gross kind. I’ll only be using it for the interface, where it seems to work.

This will be our first consumer rather than business product, so a whole new set of problems to deal with.

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