[Lazarus] External/out-of-tree LCL widgetset

Michael Schnell mschnell at lumino.de
Thu Nov 30 10:04:04 CET 2017


On 30.11.2017 00:02, Graeme Geldenhuys via Lazarus wrote:
>
> RAD style development is highly overrated...
I do know that very exactly, been there often enough.

RAD is great to create "small" applications, but with huge projects, you 
will very likely hit a limit where you wish you would not have started 
the project in an RAD manner.

Nonetheless there are lots of 3rd party components for Delphi (and 
Lazarus if you can get them in source code) that prevent to do your 
projects using them in a non-RAD manner, as they provide or organize 
business logic but their components need to be "dragged on a form" and 
create some user interface there, instead of just providing hooks to 
have the user do his own GUI for them if appropriate.

Porting originally RAD crafted projects to a headless environment (e.g. 
a small embedded device or to allow running them as a service) is 
possible (did that multiple times) but a real PITA.

That is why a long standing wish is a fully fledged LCL Widget Type 
(just swap the Widget Type in the project's configuration in Lazarus and 
press compile), that provides no local GUI but some hook to optionally 
attach a remote GUI. MSE can do something like this via "ifi" (i.e. an 
external fpc program connected via some stream interface), more 
"generally usable" would be an application running in a browser (e.g. 
Pascal compiled Java script or WebAssembly) connected via 
HTTP/WebSocket, and a decently prepared way to use such "nearly remote" 
GUI for a Linux/Windows/Mac "service".

-Michael



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