On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, sam th wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Jul 25, 2000 at 01:04:45AM +0100, Iain Hallam wrote:
> > > Works OK with Times New Roman out of the email with Abiword 7.10 on Windows
> > > 98. I thought that was a standard character anyway in quite a lot of
> > > things - it was certainly prevalent on the Amiga. Thinking of which, does
> > > anyone know how difficult it would be to port Abiword to one of the later
> > > Amiga Workbenches? They always had an X emulation layer built in to allow
> > > cross platform stuff, so it might be worth investigating whether it would be
> > > possible.
> >
> > It would be about as difficult as a port to any other platform. Abi's
> > porting strategy tends to be porting the XAP application framework to
> > that platform. Unfortunately, currently most dialogs are
> > platform-specific which results in a LOT of work for porters. A fringe
> > port to a platform like AmigaOS would be likely to fall behind just as
> > the BeOS port has.
>
> Well, to reply to the implied criticism of our strategy here:
I don't really think that there was any implied criticism ... just a
comment about how the framework works. Attempting to keep all of the
platforms in line when new dialogs are created is without a doubt
the most challenging task involved with AbiWord's cross platform
development model. The framework is in fact quite nicely designed
so that quite a bit of work and feature implementation can go on
entirely in the realm of XP code. I find this very nice since it
means that I can concentrate on platform specific code and matching
functionality while someone else can work on improving features and
core functionality. I think the recent list work is the best
example of this.
> 1) I think high-level abstraction was the way to go, rather than trying to
> base everything on something like GDK. It gives us the native
> look-and-feel so lacking on many other XP apps (cough*mozilla*cough).
I agree, but then again a framework like wxWin would also give us a
standard look and feel. We've already beat this horse dead so I'll
stop right now =;-)
> 2) BeOS is doing very well now. They are almost keeping up with Bill
> Carpenter in code volume produced. :-) I think BeOS will be on track for
> 1.0.
Yes I'm very encouraged by the recent work that has been done. It looks
like a core of 4 - 5 people have picked up the port and started doing the
work of implementing the missing dialogs (which is most of the work
required to bring it up to parity).
> 3) Both the Be and QNX ports were written by one person, in fact, the same
> person wrote them both. Not coincidentally, he's the only non-abisource
> person in Primary Authors. So it can't be *that* hard. :-)
Or it could be exceedingly difficult and that one person was just
quite talented and worked like crazy to get the platforms off the
ground =;-) Nahh you're right it isn't that hard to do a port
once you have a feel for the framework and know your way around
your graphical environment.
Thomas
-------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas (toe-mah) Fletcher QNX Software Systems
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Neutrino Development Group
(613)-591-0931 http://www.qnx.com/~thomasf
