Re: Commercial GTK+ development tool

["Baeseman, Clifford" <clifford baeseman greenheck com>]

I am one of the guys that started the Lazarus project. I think you are
grossly under estimating the effort required to build such a thing. In
our case it has been under development for over three years just to get
it up to the usable stage that it is in right now. For most of the first
year most hard core developers on the system where putting in over 60
hours a week working on just the wrapper libraries... I also worked on
Boa and it to was a huge amount of work and is still only pretty good at
what it does. Lazarus uses abstract interface classes to provide
pluggable widget sets which did make it more difficult but even binding
to a single widget set is still considerable effort.

I do not want to discourage you but it is a huge task ...good luck..

Cliff Baeseman 


On Wed, 2002-07-10 at 14:21, Carl Best wrote:
> I have been musing about the possibility of a commercially developed and
> marketed Rapid Application Development Environment (i.e. Delphi) using
> GTK+ (and possibly support for GNOME widgets) as the base widget set.
> This may not be the forum to ask the following questions, but here goes
> anyway (I AM SURE FLAMES ARE SOON TO FOLLOW :):
>  
> 1) Does the LGPL license that GTK+ is distributed under prohibit the
> creation of a closed source object oriented wrapper library (say in C++
> or a hand crafted object oriented scripting language) This library would
> be used by a RAD IDE to provide a method to rapidly create applications
> for Linux/Unix and be supported and maintained. 
>  
> 2) If the answer to question one is no, and the library is considered a
> "derivative work", if the wrapper library is released under the LGPL
> (say like GTK--) can the IDE be released under a closed source licence?
> (I Like this option better since it would allow open source development
> using the wrapper library, while only costing money when developers
> wanted to use the RAD IDE, IMHO much more flexible)
>  
> I have been thinking on this subject since there seems to be no well
> supported, professional quality RAD IDE for GTK+/GNOME, and GNOME seems
> like it will be the predominant desktop environment for Solaris/Linux
> (and possibly other unix vendors). I have been developing on
> Linux/Solaris with GTK+ for 2+ years now and REALLY would like such a
> tool. I have also developed on windows 5+ years and have gotten quite
> accustomed to tools like C++ Builder/Delphi (and also MFC (YUCK!),
> although the only thing Visual about Visual C++ is the code you see when
> you type it!). If companies are ever to port their desktop apps to
> Linux, they need tools windows developers will be comfortable with. If
> they have to hand code everything and the learning code is too high,
> they will most probably decide that the ROI for such a port is very well
> not worth the effort (I am speaking from actual experience here!). 
>  
> Oh, I have looked at GLADE, Boa Constructor, Lazarus, VDK Builder, wxGTK
> (not a RAD environment, a toolkit), etc ... 
> The problem with these tools, even though most of them accellerate
> certain parts of the development cycle (and do what they do very well),
> is that NONE provide the level of RAD development capability that almost
> ALL of the windows RAD tools do. Most, not all, exclude integrated
> debugging, integrated help, context sensitive help, etc... 
>  
> Thanks in advance, 
> Carl
>  
> FLAMES MAY START NOW, I GOT THICK SKIN ! :)