[lazarus] GTK or XLib or Whatever

[Jeff Wormsley]

>I am asking so I can make a decision.  Without asking for other people's REASONS behind the idea's I can't make a decision.  Now perhaps this has gone opn long enough, but I still don't see any reason to change the way we are doing it..

The only reason I have for questioning an intial tight integration with GTK comes from my experience with working on other programs.  

As an example, the company I work for makes equipment for the vending industry.  Some of our devices are similar to ATM machines, in that you insert a card and recieve funds from an account (placed on the card, though, not cash).  One device is very simple, no user interaction at all.  They put in their card, and it adds some amount of funds based on the software settings.  Another device is more complicated, and allows the user to select an amount.  These two devices use very different communications protocols.  One device was controlled by one piece of software, designed soley to control that device.  The other had it's own software for controlling it.  And then came the day that someone decided it would be great if each piece of software could control each device.  Neither piece of software had been designed with the other device in mind, and believe me, getting those pieces of code to communicate efficiently and cleanly was not a small effort.  If they had been designed differently, anticipating the need for multiple protocols (shared on the same RS-485 port), then the job would have been much simpler.

This type of situation is what I see could happen to this project as well, if it isn't approached from the beginning with multiple interfaces in mind.

In an attempt to make this easier, it would seem that what we may need is to do work concurrently on more than one platform.  If you keep going on Gtk, I could work on native (non Gtk) Win32.  At least that way, we could decide early on where the divisions lie.  Hopefully, most of the issues that would affect other platforms like Qt, Gnome, etc. would have already been worked out.  At least it would give us the advantage of having a system that was designed for multiplatform from the ground up.

I will check out the sources on my Win machine at home this evening and see if I can find  good place to start.

Jeff.