I have seen a few threads that touch on GUI programming in OCaml but I don't feel they clearly lead to a clear-cut solution when a GUI interface is needed.
My question, to be more specific, is as follows: What is the most effective (and easy to pick up) approach in programming a GUI for OCaml software? Has anyone come into contact with simple and effective GUI modules in OCaml itself or found an effective language or free software package in which this can be done and that communicates/plays nicely with OCaml?
I have written an interpreter in OCaml, so my lexer, parser, core interpreter functions, etc. are OCaml modules. Currently, I have a command line solution (a "main.ml") that allows the user to interact with the interpreter by typing in expressions into the command line and receiving printed terminal output that shows the parsed and reduced expression, etc. However, the command line solution is only for testing purposes. I want users to interact via a GUI, it can be simple (Java frames comes to mind from eons ago), but needs to somehow interface with the OCaml modules I have coded. There is one library in OCaml I have found so far: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml-4.00/manual042.html. Does anyone know if this is effective and useful? (I think I've caught negative comments about this library)
If I chose to program the GUI in a more optimal language, would the software interaction be: write GUI in suited language (perhaps C++, Python, etc.), then compile the OCaml written interpreter into an executable, then connect the GUI somehow to the executable?I am not interested in some loosely connected or strange solution, via pipes (I keep thinking of inter-process communication for these, such what is concerned in operating system design) or sockets (I tend to think of these for network programming), I imagine there must some way to "house" my OCaml-coded interpreter in another language's GUI code if not OCaml itself. Any thoughts, guidance, or suggestions?
EDIT: I would be happy if I could get a GUI for a Linux-like operating system (i.e. Linux RedHat). If I could get the GUI to work on Windows that would be great, but at minimum I'm aiming for Linux.
EDIT 2: Just found this, does anyone have thoughts on "OCaml-Java"? http://ocamljava.x9c.fr/ It sounds pretty interesting, as it has, "...the ability to run Objective Caml sources that have been compiled using ocamlc; second, the ability to compile Objective Caml sources into executable jar files." My concern is that it never struck me that Java would be the best way to go to get a quick but useful GUI...