On 11/19/06, Nataraj S Narayan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Please tell me how this project is going to be useful compared to GTK or QT?
As a contractor, I write a lot of cross-platform applications. FPC and Lazarus does wonders with this, hence the reason I switched from Delphi. But the problem comes in mostly with the underlying widget sets. Even though Lazarus uses the LCL to make all interfaces to the widget sets the same, the workings of the widget sets still differ. Take the treeview for an example. It looks and works slightly different in GTK1 compared to GTK2 or Windows. This confuses the hell out of my users. Then you get to the events or widget properties. Different events fire in GTK1 compared to GTK2 in the ListView and Combo Boxes, if I remember correctly. Then compare that to Windows. This makes it really hard on me! I test something under GTK1 and it works fine, compile it against GTK2 or Windows and then the event order is different and the app crashes. Yes this has happened to me, and takes a lot of effort to keep testing my app on all widgets sets. My preference, even though this my sound weird to some... I would prefer to find a bug in a component under Windows, and know that bug should also exist under Linux. That is at least consistent and much easier to fix. Then we look at distribution. Write a simple app in Lazarus using GTK1 and run ldd against it, to see what it depends on. The list is huge. Under GTK2, it is even bigger. Using fpGUI, you only need GDI or Xlib. Now comes portability. It is a huge undertaking to support a new widget set using the LCL. Using fpGUI, you only need to implement the graphics library (GFX) to use the underlying painting API's on whatever platform. The widgets in fpGUI don't do any painting themselves, they always talk to the GFX library instead. Then my personal favorite! The layout managers. After years of developing with Delphi, I really got sick of trying to keep components aligned correctly in forms, etc. Lazarus has much better support for this, but still there is problems. What happens if the dpi setting differs, or the app gets translated from English to say Afrikaans. In Afrikaans, any text is on avg 50% wider than English. Now in you hard coded widths, you get clipping. Using auto sizing, brings it's own share of problems. The layout managers in fpGUI handles all this for you. No need to specify exact positions of components, no need to specify min or max widths or heights. The different layout managers handle alignment and sizing for you. A major burden has been removed from the developer. Anyway, the list goes on, but I think you get the idea... :-) -- Graeme Geldenhuys Location: S 34° 03.168' E018° 49.342' http://tinyurl.com/y6lc26 There's no place like 127.0.0.1 _________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
