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Re: looking ahead to 3.6
From: |
John Swensen |
Subject: |
Re: looking ahead to 3.6 |
Date: |
Sun, 13 Feb 2011 13:12:21 -0500 |
On Feb 13, 2011, at 9:49 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
>
> Ok, more seriously, I'm really glad that you've looked favourably upon
> a GUI. I am a little concerned that GTK+ won't be the best option,
> though, even if OctaveDE is just about the only one doing the right
> thing. I think of projects like TortoiseHg (which by the way is an
> awesome graphical frontend to hg, y'all should try it) which started
> with GTK+, started experiencing cross-platform difficulties, and
> switched to Qt. It seems to me that Qt provides the best
> cross-platform graphical experience, but then again, OctaveDE's
> developer seems to be a heavy Mac OS X user, and those guys tend to
> have a respected sense of aesthetics.
>
>>
Even though I have done a bit of work on OctaveDE using GTK+, I am not married
to the toolkit. In fact, while GTK+ works great for Linux and OSX, there will
still be hurdles for Windows (namely getting VTE to work properly and the
already stated OpenGL issues). The biggest problem I see with QT is that there
isn't a terminal emulator widget (Konsole doesn't compile for Windows and the
variety of Konsole derivatives that are QT4-only also don't compile on
Windows). AFAIK FLTK doesn't have a terminal emulator widget either.
Having said all this, I think there are a few options that seem reasonable:
(1) Push forward with OctaveDE and solve any problems that arise on the Windows
platform
(2) Make a decision to use QT4 and find/adapt/make a terminal emulator widget
(probably having to solve the same problems associated with Windows not having
PTYs that occur for GTK+ and VTE).
(3) Pick a toolkit like Java (I am probably inviting a lot of flaming here) to
implement the IDE in. In some sense, this seems like the most reasonable
solution to make sure we get all platforms. The backend would be the same for
all platforms (with the OpenGL stuff handled in the Octave C++ code) and the
IDE would be supported on any platform that has a recent Java runtime. There
are toolkits on top of Java, like SWT from the Eclipse project, that provide
better UI elements than default Java Swing. I'm not sure if there is a good
terminal emulator widget for Java that works across all platforms (I'm assuming
there is as Eclipse has one). There would need to be a small Java<->C++
interface, probably similar in functionality to the octave_server class I use
in OctaveDE.
I am not so far into OctaveDE that I would be opposed to switching to whatever
is deemed the "best" solution by the powers that be. I just think it is time
that we start combining forces on an IDE and make sure that we do it "right".
I'm not saying that throwing out readline and re-implementing the command line,
like QTOctave, is wrong but it does cause a lot of extra work for some
functionalities that already seem there. I'm not quite sure what "right" is in
light of the problems that are apparently posed mostly by the Windows platform,
but we should collectively decide what is "right" and push forward.
John Swensen
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, (continued)
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, Michael Goffioul, 2011/02/12
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, Søren Hauberg, 2011/02/12
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, Ben Abbott, 2011/02/12
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, Kai Habel, 2011/02/13
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso, 2011/02/13
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, CdeMills, 2011/02/13
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6,
John Swensen <=
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, Richard Campbell, 2011/02/13
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, Michael Goffioul, 2011/02/14
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, John Swensen, 2011/02/14
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, Michael Goffioul, 2011/02/14
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, John Swensen, 2011/02/14
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso, 2011/02/14
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, Søren Hauberg, 2011/02/14
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, John Swensen, 2011/02/14
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, John Swensen, 2011/02/14
- Re: looking ahead to 3.6, Michael Goffioul, 2011/02/15