Sikuli ‘Hello World’

My last few posts have been about the popular programming tool developed by MIT, called Sikuli [Sick-ooh-lee]. More information is available at http://www.sikuli.org. That being said, I’m going to show you just how easy Sikuli is by creating a ‘Hello World’ program. For those of you who don’t know what that is, read a short overview here.

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First, open the Sikuli IDE. For those of you without it, now would be a wise time to download it at http://www.sikului.org. We’ll create a version that opens a messagebox with your desired text, in this case, ‘Hello World’.

Now, for the first step. Creating a messagebox. This is incredibly simple, using the ‘popup’ function. Remember that Sikuli is based on Java, so some lots of the code will seem oddly familiar for a Java guru.

To initialize a messagebox, or popup, we need to call it, using the code below.

Now, we need to specify the text within the popup, as the command listed previously will throw an error without specification. To do that, we use quotes. The following code will create a popup, and populate it with the text within the quotes.

That’s it. Seriously, I’m not kidding. While other programming languages will have you create framework, layouts, etc, we’ve just created a simple ‘Hello World’ program using Sikuli in seconds. In the IDE, your code should look along the lines of this:

The Sikuli code to display 'Hello World'

When this code is run, it will display a nice messagebox just like this:

Enjoy!