[Lazarus] What are "widgets" in lazarus?

[Bo Berglund]

On Wed, 05 Jan 2011 13:05:26 +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd
<markMLl.lazarus at telemetry.co.uk> wrote:

>Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
>> Op 2011-01-05 14:24, Mark Morgan Lloyd het geskryf:
>>> Yes, I was going to mention that but at present it's unclear whether 
>>> it's immediately usable from the Lazarus IDE.
>> 
>> fpGUI works with any IDE or editor - their are no dependencies to a
>> specific IDE.
>
>Right, so you're saying that it's not integrated with Lazarus to the 
>same extent that the LCL is. If that is the case I'm not sure that it's 
>going to be a painless option for Bo.
>
>Bo, I suggest that you check that your board supports GTK etc. If it 
>doesn't support GTK but it does have basic X graphics then fpGUI might 
>be the least painful option.
>
>-- 
>Mark Morgan Lloyd

Back again so I could read up on this thread...

So basically a widget set is a definition on what kind of graphics
environment is used on the target system then?
What about making a program for Linux? Do we have to compile the same
program in different versions for different desktop managers on Linux?
Like one for Gnome, another for KDE and yet another for X???
Sounds mighty tedious and error prone...

My first project is to make an embedded application but develop it on
a Windows host where I also want it to be running for checks etc.
This application needs some basic graphics, like using Canvas methods
to draw simple geometric forms on an image.
It is similar to a graphing software visualizing acquired data as
points (colored circles) connected by lines on a Cartesian coordinate
system graph. Nothing fancier than that.

In Delphi I created a very small graphic object TGraphImage, which has
methods for scaling the canvas to real values as opposed to pixels,
drawing lines, rectangles, circles etc with various simple colors. It
can also print text labels on the image.
I would like to use this also in Lazarus and in the embedded
environment.

The embedded card is a touch panel from Technologic Systems
(http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=TS-TPC-7390#),
which runs an embedded version of Debian Linux, I believe.
If it supports GTK (what is that?) or not I don't know but I will ask
them.

The other thing I want to do is convert an existing application for
data analysis to run in Lazarus and crosscompiled for Linux x86 so we
have more options for the customers.
The aim here is to get Windows/Linux versions and also to get it
compiled for 64 bit so we can use larger data sets.
But here is the caveat that the number crunching is done in Fortran
generated DLL:s (se other threads)....


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden