[Lazarus] fpGUI

[Sven Barth]

Am 17.01.2011 11:03, schrieb michael.vancanneyt at wisa.be:
>
>
> On Mon, 17 Jan 2011, Sven Barth wrote:
>
>> Am 17.01.2011 10:18, schrieb michael.vancanneyt at wisa.be:
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, 17 Jan 2011, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
>>>
>>>> Op 2011-01-17 09:33, Martin Schreiber het geskryf:
>>>>> Graeme, - please, no offending meant -
>>>>
>>>> None taken.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> fpGUI has implemented at the moment probably less than 50% of a
>>>>> good RAD
>>>>> development environment like Lazarus, Delphi or MSEide+MSEgui.
>>>>
>>>> RAD is overrated (marketing speak) and only good for prototyping.
>>>
>>> I beg to differ. When used properly, RAD is just that: RAD.
>>> But it takes someone who knows what he's doing to properly set it up.
>>>
>>> Out of the box, Delphi (or lazarus) needs a lot of work if you want to
>>> use it for large applications. But with the right subclasses,
>>> properties, wizards and component editors, RAD is the best you can do to
>>> create applications quickly. Doubly so if your development team
>>> consists of people of various skill levels.
>>
>> Out of curiosity: what would Lazarus need according to you to be a
>> good RAD IDE?
>
> Nothing. It has all it needs.
> Maybe more controls in the style of TButtonPanel: specialized controls.
>
> Each project/firm/team has its own design goals. Lazarus (or Delphi) cannot
> cater for all these goals. But they do allow you to extend the IDE so you
> can keep working in a RAD way and still follow your design goals with a
> minimum of effort.
>
> I have an application with 1500 forms. It would be madness to have to set
> over and over again the same set of properties and event handlers to
> save/restore formlayout, ask to save unsaved data, sort grids and
> whatnot. So
> - You create a descendent of TForm (or TCustomForm)
> - You add all 'common' functionality to this descendant, plus lots of extra
> properties to control this functionality.
> - You register this form in the IDE under File/New
> - You do the same for common controls. Grids, date edits, whatnot. You
> register them on the component palette.
> - Create a wizard that creates an initial layout for the form, based on the
> data you'll be editing in that form. (we use 3-tier data, but you can do
> exactly the same for a persistence framework)
>
> After that, you create new forms extremely fast without losing RAD
> functionality: a pure point-and-click environment, which is always
> faster than coding, and which is understood by people of many skill levels.
>
> Many forms in my applications don't have any form-specific code
> associated with them whatsoever: just the class declaration and form
> file. Yet they offer a lot of functionality out of the box.
>
> Since it is simply OOP, You could do all of this in code, but code is
> slower
> to create and is more error-prone. Hence RAD and point-and-click.

Thank you for the extensive explanation.

Regards,
Sven