Re: UI/IDE committee
- Posted by xecronix Dec 09, 2015
- 7608 views
Andreas, these are very good questions. But first let me preface the rest of this response by saying thanks to Greg who has worked very hard to provide an excellent wrapper and GUI programming option to OE. In addition to providing a wrapper the IDE he's been working on is coming along nicely. These should be exciting times for OE in the near future.
In my opinion, the committee has failed though. While an official GUI was stated earlier this week, there has been no discussions on how to integrate the project with OE. In fact, what was accomplished is the creation of another dll/wrapper that exists in the community user space. While this by it's self isn't a bad thing, my hopes were that we would have discussed at least some of the obvious concerns such as distribution and keeping true to some of the other OE goals. Since I've mentioned this in e-mail and publicly on these forums I'll only briefly mention high level discussion that should happen between the committee members if the project is going to succeed beyond the success of the already existing similar projects such as Wx and GTK.
- Cross platform distribution of the IUP solution (dll & wrapper)
- Integration of the above with the OE build and packaging processes
- Cross platform distribution of OE user's programs
- Complied vs Interpreted usage of OE user's programs. (Closely related to the above)
- DLL/Wrapper sync (ie what happens when a customer upgrades IUP)
- DLL location
So, i think (or hope) there should be a link to download the wrapper and the shared libs (eg. .so and .dll).
On a prominent place...
If the above concerns are discussed and addressed you would not need to worry about these things and you could just focus on building your program. This path of downloading wrappers and DLLs from the archive or other places has proven to not be a very effective long term solution to this problem in the past. Proof of that is the fact that we are having this conversation now.
Who should test it? If it is not easy to download or even to find? Who should help to improve it?
This is an open source project and is currently being worked on in a very public way. In fact, the project is housed at a defacto community repository. Greg has been soliciting help from testers since the beginning. Given that we have a small community, everyone should probably help support the project either by forking the code and working on it, or testing the code and creating bug reports, or finding ways to help with documentation. Bitbucket easily supports all of these avenues.
https://bitbucket.org/ghaberek/editor
Who should know there is a supported toolkit if it is not even mentioned on the Homepage?
Sure, I agree. Maybe some news about the project on the homepage is warranted. But, I would expect an Official GUI to have a section in the Official Documentation. Clearly we're not there yet.
Or is it a secret, only for 'internal' use? Or even a pet-project for the 'UI/IDE committee'?
I wouldn't call Greg's IUP efforts a pet-project but more of a proof of concept. He has a program that is generating the wrapper from the C header files. If this concept works long term, this is a big win for OE. Again, not a secret though. He's mentioned it in the forums and on the project bitbucket homepage. https://bitbucket.org/ghaberek/editor
I hope I've provided a realistic state of things for the community.
