Re: [Lazarus] [OT] New free IDE from Trolltech
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 12:15 AM, Kostas Michalopoulos [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think Qt's dual license says that you have to give copyrights to Trolltech if you want your modifications to be merged back to the Qt codebase. So basically anyone who worked on Qt to improve KDE or his own application also helped Trolltech. Yes, otherwise they wouldn't be able to sell it. They pay most KDE developers, so it's not really like they are improving Qt for free. -- Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] [OT] New free IDE from Trolltech
Probably what you're seeing here in the RemObjects/Codegear deal is evidence of larger trends taking place in the software industry: (1) Continued consolidation, like in most industries. Codegear and RemObjects both probably concluded that their .NET products were going nowhere fast in a market dominated by VB.NET/C#, so they figured joining up might help both of them. (2) Continued standardizing on the dominant IDE's for most large organizations, that is on Visual Studio, Eclipse or maybe XCode if you're doing serious Mac work. This also frees up the compiler and tool developers from having to do an IDE for their products. (3) Continued mainstreaming of .NET as a development platform. I'm seeing contracts and proposals now that require .NET. Not sure if I understand the animosity toward Codegear. Without Delphi, this site wouldn't exist. Codegear's new owners seem eminently practical and pragmatic with deals like this. It appears, though, that with this deal we've lost the free command- line Oxygene Pascal compiler. It worked great with both .NET on Windows and Mono on, say, OS X (see http:// wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Using_Pascal_Libraries_with_.NET_and_Mono). Here's an odd page I happened upon by accident when googling for something else: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Porting_Delphi_Clients_to_the_XO This is somehow related to the One Laptop Per Child project, which uses Linux, hence the need for Lazarus. What it tells me is that Lazarus and Free Pascal are still seen as useful, but primarily for use with legacy Delphi projects, not necessarily with new projects. In light of above trends, does it make sense to talk about how Lazarus and Free Pascal move into the future? For example, some projects I've worked on lately could definitely benefit from things like this: - A version of SWIG that supports Object Pascal syntax, so we could create Python (and possibly other) interfaces to our classes, not just to generic C-type functions. - A .NET strategy. I'm not suggesting a compiler that produces .NET assemblies, but rather some way to use our classes with .NET, maybe by wrapping them in a .NET assembly. - Possible integration with the big IDE's. Thanks. -Phil ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] [OT] New free IDE from Trolltech
2008/11/2 Mac Programmer [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Linux, hence the need for Lazarus. What it tells me is that Lazarus and Free Pascal are still seen as useful, but primarily for use with legacy Delphi projects, not necessarily with new projects. This is definitely not the case with our company. We have rewritten our flagship product, moving away from Delphi 7 and VB 6 to only using Free Pascal. We have also started a few other projects, again all of them only using Free Pascal. FPC and the Lazarus IDE is now the development tools we have standardised on. - A .NET strategy. I'm not suggesting a compiler that produces .NET assemblies, but rather some way to use our classes with .NET, maybe by wrapping them in a .NET assembly. As far as we (our company) are concerned, we are not interested in .NET at all. That's one of the reasons we moved away from Delphi (because that's all that CodeGear was interested in). We do not see the point in having to install a 120MB runtime, simply to run a single little application. Plus having to install multiple versions of the .NET runtime as they come out. We want to target multiple platforms and easy deployment - and anything other than Windows is not guaranteed to have a .NET runtime installed. Not even all Windows systems have .NET installed (we still have plenty of users running old systems with Win98 on) Also at the time, the future of Mono was doggy and WinForms didn't exist yet for Mono, though it seems to have settled and improved a bit now. Saying that, native apps are all we are interested in at the moment. If gives us the best performance and it's easy to deploy on any system. - Possible integration with the big IDE's. There is nothing wrong with the Lazarus IDE as far as I can see. To me, it's even better than Delphi IDE. Plus it's really easy to extend and alter if you don't like something or found a bug. No more having to wait two years for the next release, and having to pay a fortune for it. Plus the actual people using the tool (developers) can guide it's future - not some marketing team simply worrying about the bottom line. Regards, - Graeme - ___ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] [OT] New free IDE from Trolltech
Mac Programmer schrieb: (2) Continued standardizing on the dominant IDE's for most large organizations, that is on Visual Studio, Eclipse or maybe XCode if you're doing serious Mac work. This also frees up the compiler and tool developers from having to do an IDE for their products. Using a generic IDE like Eclipse saves almost no time, the time consuming and great things like good debugger support, source code browsing require still a lot of work and one is bound to some strange code base. - A version of SWIG that supports Object Pascal syntax, so we could create Python (and possibly other) interfaces to our classes, This is as useless as a a .Net backend. Such a beast might have OP syntax but everything must be recoded anyways due to different libraries etc. - A .NET strategy. I'm not suggesting a compiler that produces .NET assemblies, but rather some way to use our classes with .NET, maybe by wrapping them in a .NET assembly. - Possible integration with the big IDE's. IMO the only IDE superior to Lazarus is Visual Studio, but this is only due to the great debugger and things like Edit and Continue and this is something which cannot achived by some plugin like integration. ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] [OT] New free IDE from Trolltech
- A version of SWIG that supports Object Pascal syntax, so we could create Python (and possibly other) interfaces to our classes, This is as useless as a a .Net backend. Such a beast might have OP syntax but everything must be recoded anyways due to different libraries etc. Afraid I'm not following you at all here since I'm not talking about .NET. Thanks. -Phil ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
[Lazarus] [OT] New free IDE from Trolltech
Has anybody seen this one...? http://trolltech.com/developer/qt-creator It seems CodeGear is getting stiff competition from all sides now! RemObjects took over the .NET side. Eclipse from the Java side. Free Pascal/Lazarus taking over the Delphi native side (my personal opinion). And now TrollTech wants to take over there C/C++ side. Poor company [CodeGear] must be pretty worried by now - their future seems more and more uncertain by the day. Regards, - Graeme - ___ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] [OT] New free IDE from Trolltech
Graeme, Guess you didn't get the news about RemObjects and Codegear joining forces: http://bitwisemag.com/ Also, TrollTech (now owned by Nokia) has had Qt Designer for years for C++ developers working with Qt. Not sure what changes with Qt Creator (maybe just a new name?). Thanks. -Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Graeme Geldenhuys Sent: Sat 11/1/2008 2:50 AM To: General mailing list Subject: [Lazarus] [OT] New free IDE from Trolltech Has anybody seen this one...? http://trolltech.com/developer/qt-creator It seems CodeGear is getting stiff competition from all sides now! RemObjects took over the .NET side. Eclipse from the Java side. Free Pascal/Lazarus taking over the Delphi native side (my personal opinion). And now TrollTech wants to take over there C/C++ side. Poor company [CodeGear] must be pretty worried by now - their future seems more and more uncertain by the day. Regards, - Graeme - ___ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus winmail.dat___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] [OT] New free IDE from Trolltech
2008/11/1 Hess, Philip J [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Guess you didn't get the news about RemObjects and Codegear joining forces: Yes I did, but from the accouncements, it was pretty clear to me that RemObjects are going to do most of the work. CodeGear will simply comment here and there. All CodeGear is doing with Delphi Prism is sponsor some dbExpress stuff, the rest is all pre-existing RemObjects (Chrome or Oxygen) work. Also, TrollTech (now owned by Nokia) has had Qt Designer for years for C++ developers working with Qt. Not sure what changes with Qt Creator (maybe just a new name?). Qt Designer is just a forms designer. Qt Creator is an IDE (forms designer, editor, debugger, help viewer etc...) Regards, - Graeme - ___ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] [OT] New free IDE from Trolltech
I think it's very interresting how things turned out. Trolltech started as a very small company, like 2 guys in a garage, and they started developing their UNIX GUI library, a very small niche market. At this time, Borland was huge, with their Windows GUI library + IDE + Toolchain, and hat a large market, was one of the most important player in the software development area. A lot of people said in the borland newsgroups: support Mac OS X, support Linux, go Unicode, go 64-bits, etc. But they never listened, instead they went .NET, feeding the competition and stoping in time. After a huge delay they finally went unicode. Trolltech on the other hand went cross-platform, and walked their way up with a very good quality product. So now, the way I see it, things are inverted. Delphi is a small niche player with little future ahead of it, while Trolltech seams much more important, and is even active in the smartphone and PDA areas, with their own frame buffer library and also support for Windows CE coming soon. I don't have their profits and market value, but I wouldn't be surprised if Trolltech is much ahead of CodeGear nowadaws. It seams that the crowd saying that cross-platform is important was correct. Luckly there is Free Pascal and Lazarus, so people with Object Pascal code bases don't need to sink with the Delphi boat. -- Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] [OT] New free IDE from Trolltech
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 11:16 PM, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think it's very interresting how things turned out. Trolltech started as a very small company, like 2 guys in a garage, and they started developing their UNIX GUI library, a very small niche market. Yeah, I read the history of Trolltech company some time back. Their wives supported them for the first year while they just did coding on Qt. :-) My wife's not falling for that one! :-( A lot of people said in the borland newsgroups: support Mac OS X, support Linux, go Unicode, go 64-bits, etc. But they never listened, instead they went .NET, feeding the competition and stoping in time. A classic case of following the hype and marketing bull***t of other companies. And not listening to what there real customers (developers) actually want. Trolltech on the other hand went cross-platform, and walked their way up with a very good quality product. I must say, I am truly impressed with the Qt product. It's just amazing what Trolltech has achieved and at the speed that they are doing it. Luckly there is Free Pascal and Lazarus, so people with Object Pascal code bases don't need to sink with the Delphi boat. Oh so true! I love the FPC/Lazarus community and the Object Pascal language. As much as I like the idea of what Qt has become and achieved, there is no way I am switching to C/C++ language and also not at a $5000 per developer license. Regards, - Graeme - ___ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] [OT] New free IDE from Trolltech
Graeme Geldenhuys wrote: I must say, I am truly impressed with the Qt product. It's just amazing what Trolltech has achieved and at the speed that they are doing it. I think Qt's dual license says that you have to give copyrights to Trolltech if you want your modifications to be merged back to the Qt codebase. So basically anyone who worked on Qt to improve KDE or his own application also helped Trolltech. Kostas Bad Sector Michalopoulos ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
