[Lazarus] Target Survey

[Michael Schnell]

On 07/20/2016 11:59 AM, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> I never really understood the need for that - but then I don't know 
> MSEgui very well. What I mean is, X11 already natively supports 
> running applications remotely. Also with the popularity of Remote 
> Desktop, VNC, TeamViewer (which is absolutely brilliant and even does 
> session recordings in unbelievable small file sizes), I think all 
> based are already covered pretty well.

All these options use an external complex graphics library in the remote 
"embedded" target.

The device is a thingy that nowadays in "new speak" is called and 
"Internet of Things" node. Hence a potentially very small and needing to 
be very cheap and extremely  energy efficiently running device. So it 
does not feature any hardware allowing for displaying a GUI, and the OS 
and library infrastructure does not support any GUI work. Microsoft 
recently hopped on that bus by providing "Windows IoT" for free that in 
fact is Windows 10 with all GUI stuff stripped off. (A Colleague of mine 
was able to run Windows Services (that don't have a GUI) written in 
Delphi on Win IoT running on an Intel CPU based "embedded" board.)

So, my original (some 5 years old) motivation for the said enhancement 
to the LCL was running Lazarus- (or having been Delphi-) projects on 
such a board (usually called "embedded" at that time, the infrastructure 
of which does not provide any support for a GUI), after developing them 
on a PC in the "normal" RAD  way (i.e. porting them from existing 
projects). Here having a Widget Type "remote GUI" would be extremely 
helpful for testing/examining and occasionally configuring the device.

-Michael