I think the reason the guys decided to go to J7 was that J6 was a
dead-end as far as UIs. J7 opens up handheld devices etc. Language
development could have happened on J6, but would have been less likely,
because the language itself would have less of a future.
Of course, language development is still stymied for lack of any
officially-sanctioned way to distribute changes, but that's a different
issue.
Henry Rich
On 1/5/2013 8:15 AM, Dan Bron wrote:
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
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