The wd implementation vastly simplifies the GUI landscape for J6/J7 users. It is much easier to port existing apps to J8 and IMO provides a simpler and more powerful GUI design experience compared the old J6 wd, while at the same time being vastly more consistent across platforms.
As I see it there are a couple of additional benefits of the have in the J IDE written using wd: a) once the wd Qt interface becomes stable there should be much less reason to need to provide new binaries. Further development/maintenance of the ide/qt addon could then take place without any requirement to install new binaries each time, simply upgrading the addon using Package Manager would do the job. b) It provides a proof-of-concept of the wd GUI framework for a more complex application, as well as a great source of examples of how to use it to create an application. Assuming performance would be acceptable, maybe it's something that could be looked at for J8.1 or J9? On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 11:12 PM, chris burke <[email protected]> wrote: > > how feasible it would be to write the ide using the wd interface? > > It could be done, though we would need to extend wd a little. > > However, I don't think there would be much benefit. With earlier J > versions, we felt that having the IDE in J meant both that the code would > be much simpler, and also easier for the end user to customize. The first > no longer holds with Qt, i.e. the amount of source for the Qt IDE is about > the same as the source for the old J wd IDE (and both very much smaller > than for GTK). Also, we never really had end users customizing the IDE. > > One thing I do notice with Qt is that the system is noticeably snappier > than in J6 wd and J7 GTK. > > Incidentally, we didn't design it this way. Originally, the Qt IDE had no > wd, and it was only because we wanted some simple windows, e.g. for > viewmat, that we looked at it at all. Bill and I worked on this for a few > days over Xmas, and to my surprise, found that implementing wd would be > relatively straightforward. > > On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 5:26 PM, Ric Sherlock <[email protected]> wrote: > > > The wd interface for Qt seems to be rounding out really well. It looks as > > though it is pretty fast and powerful as well as being quite easy to use > > for J6 wd users. > > Currently the main part of the J Qtide is written directly in C++. I'd be > > interested to hear how feasible it would be to write the ide using the wd > > interface? > > What would be the downsides? > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
