As a J user, I am primarily interested in the language and its development. The IDE is a tool which lets me use the language, and explore concepts with it.
The J6 IDE is perfectly usable today, I am familiar with and practiced in it, and since the language proper hasn't changed much in J7, I personally do not see any reason to upgrade. It is true that any GUIs I develop in J6 are obsolescent and can't readily be shared with the rest of the community, but I don't really do GUIs much, anyway. And, given the wealth of choices for frontends in J7, you could say the same of GUIs developed in those, as well. Perhaps the best practice is to develop GUIs for J apps completely independent from the apps themselves. Maybe in another language, development environment, or technology. That would immunize developers from current and future changes in J's frontend systems. Or maybe not. Others in this Forum likely have better informed opinions on GUI development than I do. As I said, my primary use of J is solving little puzzles and playing with the language. So for me, the largest, or perhaps only, motivation to upgrade would be interesting changes in the language proper. -Dan PS: or changes which break backwards compatibility and/or make it difficult to share my code with others. PPS: I threw that "and/or" in there for Devon. Please excuse typos; composed on a handheld device. On Jan 5, 2013, at 2:46 AM, chris burke <[email protected]> wrote: > We have written a new IDE in Qt, that is intended to replace the current > GTK IDE. > > The main reason for the change is portability. GTK is used mainly on Linux. > It is supposed to be cross-platform, but in practice, this is not well > supported, and there seems to be little interest in improving it. Qt does a > much better job and works well on all platforms. A side benefit is that it > is easier to program in Qt - the IDE code is noticeably simpler than for > GTK. > > If all goes well, we will simply mothball the GTK code, and switch to Qt > for the desktop IDE. Also, it was originally hoped that once the J7 GTK IDE > had settled down, our desktop users would all upgrade from J6. This hasn't > happened, but with the Qt IDE, we'd like to try once more for a good > upgrade path from J6. > > An early beta is available, see > http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Guides/Qt%20IDE. This has been developed by > Bill, Norman and myself. We would really appreciate help, both in testing > and in completing the development. Also welcome would be a code review from > anyone experienced in Qt. > > Please discuss this in the beta forum, or email the development group: qt > AT jsoftware DOT com. > > Chris > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
