Re: looking ahead to 3.6

[John Swensen]

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