Book Image

D Web Development

By : Kai Nacke
4 (1)
Book Image

D Web Development

4 (1)
By: Kai Nacke

Overview of this book

D is a programming language with C-like syntax and static typing. The vibe.d framework builds on powerful D concepts like template meta-programming and compile-time function execution to provide an easy-to-use environment for web applications. The combination of a feature-rich web programming framework with a language compiling to native code solves two common issues in web development today: it accelerates your development and it results in fast, native web applications. Learning the vibe.d framework before you start your application will help you to choose the right features to reach your goal. This book guides you through all aspects of web development with D and the vibe.d framework. Covering the popular operating systems today, this guide starts with the setup of your development system. From the first Hello World-style application you will move on to building static web pages with templates. The concise treatment of web forms will give you all the details about form handling and web security. Using the abstractions of the web framework you will learn how to easily validate user input. Next, you will add database access to your application, providing persistent storage for your data. Building on this foundation, you will expose your component and integrate other components via REST. Learning about the internals of vibe.d you will be able to use low-level techniques such as raw TCP access. The vibe.d concepts can also be used for GUI clients, which is the next topic that you will learn. vibe.d is supported by an active community, which adds new functionality. This comprehensive guide concludes with an overview of the most useful vibe.d extensions and where to find them. It also shows you how to integrate these extensions in your application. The concepts are always illustrated with source code, giving you an insight into how to apply them in your application.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
10
Index

Creating a Win32 GUI application


Due to the Win32 API, a Windows GUI application looks different from the other example applications in this book. If you are new to this topic and want to know more about it, then you should read Programming Windows, Fifth Edition, by Charles Petzold, Microsoft Press. You can find the book at http://www.informit.com/store/programming-windows-9780735692633.

The example application utilizes two fibers to draw rectangles and ellipses in two parts of the window screen. Due to the fiber-based approach, this is easy. The alternative is to use a timer event or separate threads, but this requires more coding. The Windows GUI application that you will create now looks as follows:

There is no special template for Win32 applications in dub. You can create a minimal project as follows:

$ dub init winclient --type=minimal

The generated dub.sdl file must be changed. The default main() function cannot be used—you have to specify the VibeCustomMain version. This is true for...