[lazarus] Progress

[Michael A. Hess]

On Tue, 31 Aug 1999, Samuel Liddicott wrote:

> Form designer waits on more complete (internally) VCL implementation which I
> am also working on.
> More complete VCL internals await knowledge of more GTK primitive operations
> which I am studying.

I am concerned over this statement. Exactly what GTK primitives are you
talking about? You should not be dealing with GTK primitives at all. The
whole idea of the LCL and Lazarus is to remove the requirement of using
the primitives. This is something that is handled in and by the widget set
library.

I was on vacation for 2 weeks and having read over the archive I get the
feeling that there is an impression that Lazarus and the LCL will be able
to use ALL of the wonderful tools in places like Delphi Super Page. Well
it will not. Most of these tools rely on the ability to inherit from an
existing class say TButton for example. Then they override the Draw method
to create a new button which maintains all of the original button features
such as events. This will not work with Lazarus. The reason is due to the
fact that ALL and I mean ALL of the generation of the Button, how it
looks, how it is drawn, how it reacts to events is found in and controled
by the GTK library. If you want to create a new component like that you
need to modify the GTK library. You can't do it from within Lazarus or the
LCL.

We have to keep this separation so that we can support alternate API
libraries. The minute you add that feature to GTK and us it in your
program you remove the possibility of using other API's if they do not
also have that same component. So with that respect the core part of
Lazarus and the LCL should never support more than the standard widgets
found in all API's. That is the only way that the LCL can maintain cross
platform and cross API ability.

Free Pascal, the FCL, Lazarus, and the LCL will be able to be used like
Delphi and be able to port components that are non-visible but it will
most likely NEVER be able to port a large portion of visible Delphi
components unless they are also found in other widget sets like GTK and
Qt.

Is this concept clear to everyone???

---
Michael A. Hess
Miracle Concepts, Inc.
mhess at miraclec.com