[Lazarus] dataware simple application

[Joao Serrachinha]

2008/6/17 Kostas Michalopoulos <badsector at slashstone.com>:
>
> First of all, Linux is not GTK+. There are other toolkits around, like Qt
> and FLTK which have their own theming stuff. However X11, the windowing
> system that is mostly used in Linux and other UNIX environments (which is
> *NOT* even guarranteed that it will be the one used - i've seen some other

I can't agree more!  :)

> Secondly, even if there was a "Linux theme engine", the same applies to
> Windows programs. Windows in fact *have* a theme engine and even since
> Windows 3.0 (i think) you were able to change the current theme to something
> else. However as i see, the Win32 backend allows you to change colors, while
> GTK+ does not. While i can accept that doing such a thing in GTK+ is a very
> low priority (which would imply, however, that GTK+ is not finished and if
> 1.0 has to have GTK+ 1.2 finished then it has to provide this functionality
> too), i find the answer of not doing it because the theme engine dictates
> look as a cheap excuse (because otherwise if you really believe this, then
> rip off the code that changes colors in Win32 from LCL too - there is a
> theme engine there much older and widely used than GTK+'s).

Spot on!  It seems to me that Win32 is the primary toolkit being used
to design LCL (hence all the winapi fake methods in each widget set).
For LCL to ever reach v1, all primary widget sets should support the
same functionality. If not, remove it from the LCL.


> Of course i think the best solution for all these problems would be a
> crossplatform toolkit that sits below LCL and has a constant behavior no
> matter what the system is. fpGUI seems to be such a kit, but setting Lazarus
> to compile with this toolkit is failing due to some missing unit.

Hence the reason I develop fpGUI.  The LCL-fpGUI widget set is not
actively being developed due to fpGUI still growing.  But yes, I think
this will be the ideal solution for Lazarus. If the Lazarus developers
took this route from the start (create their own custom drawn
toolkit), I think they would have 70% less bug reports compared to now
and Lazarus would long ago have reached v1 status.  But again, that is
the benefit of hindsight and it was their design choice at the time
and I'm not going to argue that now.  ;-)



Regards,
 - Graeme -


_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/