Matlab and event-driven programs

[David Young]

The Phidgets documentation recommends using an event-driven style of programming in general, but also says that in Matlab polling is necessary because Matlab does not support function pointers.

I suspect the second statement may be out of date. Matlab does have "function handles" and these are used for event-driven programming, for example in the Image Acquisition Toolbox.

It seems a pity not to be able to exploit Phidgets' functionality fully in Matlab. I wondered if anyone could comment on whether there are any plans to update the Matlab interface to allow an event-driven style of programming?

[AdamS]

There really isn't a matlab interface.

The code samples and that getting started were developed on an older version of matlab at the time which did not support event driven programming.

I imagine that event driven programming can be done in Matlab with Phidgets, as in Matlab you are only loading an external c library into your program. However this will depend on whether the Matlab connections to the library will be able to handle the events in the Phidgets c library.

We haven't had the opportunity to test this ourselves. I believe we are hoping to be able to move to a newer version of Matlab and test this out properly, but I am not sure when that will happen at this time.

[Patrick]

I have heard of people trying out the function pointer approach, but I'm not sure if they were successful.

-Patrick

[David Young]

Thank you for the replies. Phidgets and Matlab seem like a natural combination (though of course I don't know whether they are used together a lot in practice) so an easy event-driven interface would be great.

I'll continue using Java as an adaptor for now (see my entry on a guitar player's hand movement monitor in the applications section of the forum for an example). If I get round to doing something more general at some point I'll let you know.