[lazarus]

[Lothian, Nicholas (ETSA)]

I agree totally with this. 

Perhaps someone could try and write a small XLib program with FPC, and
see how much work it is. I'll try and give it a go in the next couple of
nights.

(Got to pull all those old O'Rielly XLib manuals out..)

Nick Lothian

>----------
>From: 	John Margaglione[SMTP:jmargaglione at hotmail.com]
>Sent: 	Monday, 28 June 1999 13:36
>To: 	lazarus at miraclec.com
>Subject: 	Re: [lazarus]
>
>I don't believe the GDK is wrapped, just GLIB and GTK.  And now for a few
>comments:
>
>Wrapping XLib is an ENOURMOUS amount of work.  Period.  I think it is
>important to note that we are developing an IDE.  Integrated Development
>Environment.  Delphi is an IDE.  Delphi did NOT create a brand new widget set
>to address it's windowing controls.  It used the *standard* widgets available
>for Windows, then wrapped them.  Now, we don't have the luxury of choosing
>the standard widget set for XWindows and Windows, because there is none.  We
>do, however, have two sets of widgets that are gaining VAST acceptence: Qt
>and GTK+.  I think that using GTK+ would be a major *advantage* for us.
>Developers want the coolest looking widgets they can get their hands on.  The
>GTK+ toolkit was developed by the makers of GIMP, some of the coolest
>graphics stuff out there.  I simply doubt that any of us can make a
>cooler-looking widget set.  Not in this century, anyway.  There are other
>advantages to sticking to GTK+: 
>1.  glade projects can be ported to Lazarus with minimal amounts of GUI
>recoding, as we can easily write a program that takes the XML and turns it
>into a .dfm.  
>2.  We don't have to spend our lives keeping up with the latest component
>crazes, we just make a wrapper and get on with our own stuff.
>3.  It is currently *much* more important that we get the rest of the IDE
>working before we get our own widget libraries built.  The most popular
>functions in IDE's today are:
>    Intellisense
>    GUI Form Builders
>    Integrated Debuggers
>    Database Integration
>    Object Browsers/Class Trees
>    Syntax highlighting
>    Integration with COM/CORBA/whatever
>
>None of these features are helped by the choice of widget set except the Form
>Builder, and since glade/gIDE/etc can build interface builders with GTK, so
>can we.  I simply don't see the *relative* worth of spending months of coding
>time (and it will be months, not weeks, even with several of us working) just
>to get a little more control over the widgets.  If drawing a custom widget is
>so important, then we can make a TCustomControl that only provides a GDK
>canvas (we are wrapping the TCanvas for this, right?).  Then people can build
>any weird thing they want.  
>
>I simply think that very few application writers are in the business of
>subclassing controls.  Sure, low level component developers do this, but that
>is a very small percentage of the workforce.  Most developers want the list
>from above.  
>
>We need to prioritize some of this FAST, before we fragment into camps.
>
>John
>