On 1/26/07, Tom Verhoeff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I am interested in collecting experiences with using Lazarus in
education, in particular as a tool of primary choice for programming.
Let me hear those success stories, so I convince others ...
Ok, I have a success story, but as a student, not a teacher. Hope it
contributes, even if just a little =)
About 1 and a half year ago I developed a university project, on a 3
people team using Lazarus. It´s a Oscilloscope ISA board we designed
and manufactured ourselves. Lazarus was utilized to create a
cross-platform GUI to see the data from the board. Latter I created a
website for this and added our full documentation of the project, and
our source code, all on free licences:
http://eletronicalivre.incubadora.fapesp.br/portal/english/oscilloscope/
Basically it was I that pushed Lazarus use myself. My other coleague
that took part on the software had never utilized Lazarus or Delphi
before, having a C++ and Cobol background, but within 1 week we were
coding exceptionally fast together =)
The project had a very tight time frame, we had to deliver it working
on only 3 months, and I must say Lazarus was reliable througth all the
process and helped us make it work on our limited time. Sometimes I
was scaried when I found a bug, that could be caused by Lazarus, but
all these times it was proved that the bug was on our own code =)
On another topic, latter, on dezember 2006 I was given the task at the
Faculty of Education to take a Open Source project, the Virtual
Magnifying Glass, a windows only magnification tool, and make it
cross-platform, translatable, and add some other features. I´m not
sure how to call in english what I did there. Basically I would help
the teaches with software development, and also participate on
scientific papers. With a small salary from the governament.
Here is the project website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/magnifier
At that point the project was developed on C++ with Visual Studio,
using Windows API directly, and some MFC calls. I studied how to port
it, but it was clear that porting it would require a full rewrite. I
talked to the original developers, and said I would like to rewrite it
on Object Pascal, because my time was very limited and my skills are
better on pascal.
I wasn´t planning on substitute the c++ version, but they liked so
much the final work, that they proposed to drop the c++ code so
everyone could focus on the new cross-platform version.
The app was made so it can be compiled both with Lazarus and Delphi.
At first I used a model were I could develop forms visually, and then
after altering a form on one of the two, manual ajusts were required
to update the form for the other. But after a time I just gave up
using the form designer. All forms are now created by code (like it´s
usually done on C++/java tools), and that makes compatibility between
Lazarus and Delphi much, much easier.
I felt it was good to keep Delphi compatibility because the original
C++ app had only 200Kb, and on Windows compiled with Delphi 5 the
magnifier has 400Kb =) I didn´t want to impact them too much on the
executable size. And on the other hand, the other people developing
with me use Lazarus on Windows, so they don´t have to buy Delphi.
With currently 270.000 downloads I can say Object Pascal was more then
good enougth for the task =) The other members of the team adapted
fast to it, and we even received some patches.
The magnifier does intensive use of platform specific things,
specially because the users request this, and expect platform-specific
behavior, so it would probably be impossible to write it on pure Java.
For examples check our bugtracker.
Latter I kept on the project for fun. Currently I am improving the Qt
4 interface of Lazarus to make the magnifier run natively on Mac OS X.
It´s about 95% ready. On Linux it uses the Gtk 2 interface.
thanks,
--
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho
_________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
"unsubscribe" as the Subject
archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
