---------- From: John Sent: Monday, 28 June 1999 13:36 To: Subject: Re: [lazarus] I don't believe the GDK is wrapped, just GLIB and GTK. And now for a few comments: Wrapping XLib is an ENOURMOUS amount of work. Period. I think it is important to note that we are developing an IDE. Integrated Development Environment. Delphi is an IDE. Delphi did NOT create a brand new widget set to address it's windowing controls. It used the *standard* widgets available for Windows, then wrapped them. Now, we don't have the luxury of choosing the standard widget set for XWindows and Windows, because there is none. We do, however, have two sets of widgets that are gaining VAST acceptence: Qt and GTK+. I think that using GTK+ would be a major *advantage* for us. Developers want the coolest looking widgets they can get their hands on. The GTK+ toolkit was developed by the makers of GIMP, some of the coolest graphics stuff out there. I simply doubt that any of us can make a cooler-looking widget set. Not in this century, anyway. There are other advantages to sticking to GTK+: 1. glade projects can be ported to Lazarus with minimal amounts of GUI recoding, as we can easily write a program that takes the XML and turns it into a .dfm. 2. We don't have to spend our lives keeping up with the latest component crazes, we just make a wrapper and get on with our own stuff. 3. It is currently *much* more important that we get the rest of the IDE working before we get our own widget libraries built. The most popular functions in IDE's today are: Intellisense GUI Form Builders Integrated Debuggers Database Integration Object Browsers/Class Trees Syntax highlighting Integration with COM/CORBA/whatever None of these features are helped by the choice of widget set except the Form Builder, and since glade/gIDE/etc can build interface builders with GTK, so can we. I simply don't see the *relative* worth of spending months of coding time (and it will be months, not weeks, even with several of us working) just to get a little more control over the widgets. If drawing a custom widget is so important, then we can make a TCustomControl that only provides a GDK canvas (we are wrapping the TCanvas for this, right?). Then people can build any weird thing they want. I simply think that very few application writers are in the business of subclassing controls. Sure, low level component developers do this, but that is a very small percentage of the workforce. Most developers want the list from above. We need to prioritize some of this FAST, before we fragment into camps. John