Hi everyone,
Today, for me) one of the biggest problem to use Lazarus and FPC in commercial application is the lack of visual components. Of course, i didn't have enough spare time to port the one i need. I asked the TMS Component team if a port to FP was possible. The answer is yes, at some conditions (native support of Qt for Mac OS, better component support for Lazarus)
We should have a team to ask our favorite developers to port the component we love in Delphi to FP.
A good report tool (even if one free is on way) should be good too. For Point Of Sales use and things like that, an OPOS port would be great. I think that it would improve FP/Lazarus (to code their component they can help to improve FP), and make it more popular. Also, it would allow me to switch most of my clients to Linux ;) I'm thinking about a page on the Lazarus wiki, please tell me if someone is already working on it or if you had better ideas ! Thanks,
Marc

Marc PERTRON wrote

I asked the TMS Component team if a port to FP was possible. The answer is yes, at some conditions (native support of Qt for Mac OS, better component support for Lazarus)

I didn´t really understand this sentence. Is it that Lazarus qt interface must improve, and lazarus component support improve, before they consider porting their components?

I also didn´t get who is going to do the porting work. I couldn´t understand if tms team will handle this or you are asking for help, or something else.

Well, here is their answer (in August 2006) :

We have thoroughly evaluated Lazarus about 9 months ago and found this IDE to be severely lacking for component development. We have also been disappointed that
the Lazarus solution for Mac is based on X Windows and will as such not work natively on Mac. Unless this situation has changed meanwhile, it is therefore unfortunately not a feasible platform for our component development. If you have information that there is meanwhile progress on these issues, please let us know and we can reevaluate this.

I also didn´t get who is going to do the porting work. I couldn´t understand if tms team will handle this or you are asking for help, or something else.

TMS team will handle it.
I'm asking for ideas, and what component do you want to be ported, to ask their developpers to do the job. Of course if 200 people asks for a commercial component, we had more chance than if i ask it for 1 people. The idea would be a wiki page, with the component, website, status (asked, is ok to port it, etc...), and a list of people who said "if you port, i'll buy")

(I really need to work a little on my english level ;))

Marc PERTRON wrote

We have also been disappointed that the Lazarus solution for Mac is based on X Windows and will as such not work natively on Mac.

Ok, in the mean time the Qt interface did in fact advance a lot. One of my projects, the magnifier ( http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/ ), is something like 95% working with Qt now, and it uses a lot of complex image operations.

However, I don´t know if they will like that Qt is only free for GPL software. For anything else, one needs to pay a Qt license.

The alternative solution is waiting until Carbon interface improves, or until Gtk 2 port to native Mac OS X is completed.

As for IDE support, I wonder what they mean by that. Maybe dynamically loading packages?