Hi

I've been following the Embarcadero Firemonkey newsgroup for a while now. For those that don't know, Firemonkey is the cross-platform replacement for VCL, and currently targets the Windows, Mac OSX and iOS platforms. Well, so far it seems Firemonkey is worse off that CLX was. The most basic functionality is still missing, and no good documentation. Simple things like loading a text file's content, getting the parameters passed to a program, ActionLists etc are all major issues with Firemonkey. Also the application code I have seen posted on the newsgroup is littered with IFDEF statements too - not a good sign for a cross-platform library. And then the worst thing that can happen in a cross platform framework - the same code/functionality behaves differently under the "supported" platforms! It seems Embarcadero rushed it and released an "alpha" version of Firemonkey to the public, instead of a 1.0 version. This is surely going to hurt their reputation a bit. The "no updates" after 11 months policy is also not helping them much either.

I guess frameworks like LCL, MSEgui and fpGUI are still safe for a while - and the better choice for true cross-platform development. :) Way to go Open Source Software!!

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

I guess frameworks like LCL, MSEgui and fpGUI are still safe for a while - and the better choice for true cross-platform development. :) Way to go Open Source Software!!

Perhaps this would be a good time and place to summarise where MSEgui and fpGUI are with respect to a form designer and IDE such as Lazarus? I for one am certainly looking forward to being able to use Lazarus to compile non-trivial projects for fpGUI, as an alternative to GTK etc.

Hi,

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

Perhaps this would be a good time and place to summarise where MSEgui and fpGUI are with respect to a form designer and IDE such as Lazarus?

fpGUI is 100% IDE independent - you can use any IDE or programmer editor. The help viewer and form designer are stand-alone tools, so work anywhere, but they can also be integrated (called via an External Tools menu item for example) from existing IDE's or Programmer Editors. I personally use both Lazarus IDE and MSEide to develop commercial fpGUI based software. No IDE is perfect, and that is why I use both. Each have their own strengths (eg: Lazarus IDE has better code navigation, but MSEide's code template design rocks). At this point I have no intention in developing a full blown IDE - I see no need for that in fpGUI. The "Maximus IDE" sample project included with fpGUI is just that - a sample project to maybe show of some more advanced features of fpGUI, or simply a more complex sample app (seeing that all my commercial projects are closed source).

As for MSEide's form designer.... I don't develop MSEgui based apps, so I don't use the integrated form designer in MSEide, but from what I have seen, it seems very capable. The IDE has a whole is very fast, light on resources and very configurable. The flexibility in Project Settings is also fantastic. Overall I find MSEide much more stable than Lazarus IDE.

And how about the second part of the question?

> I for one am certainly looking forward to being able to use Lazarus > to compile non-trivial projects for fpGUI, as an alternative to GTK > etc.

I notice that Lazarus now provides the option of using fpGUI as the widget set for generated projects: to what extent is this complete?

Hi,

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

And how about the second part of the question?

I do not understand?

I notice that Lazarus now provides the option of using fpGUI as the widget set for generated projects: to what extent is this complete?

Lazarus has had the LCL-fpGUI widgetset for years. I do not head up that development, but do submit patches from time to time. As far as I remember all the widgets from the 'Standard' component palette works, and a few other features. For more details on its progress have a look at the following wiki page.

http://wiki.freepascal.org/Roadmap#Status_of_features_on_each_widgetset