Free(real Free) GUI toolkits

[David Ross]

Maybe I should have specified any input except
trollish input.

WideStudio was designed to work on the T-Engine.

links to commercial references? Look for the T-Engine
WideStudio references, it is used in commercial
development, not a whole lot of software. I know what
you were wanting (commercial software that works on
more desktops) well this is the real world, embedded
systems have OSes too, as well as special tools.
--David Ross

Hello David,

DR> You know. you are the biggest troll I have ever
seen
DR> on the mailing list. Really, stop. I'm not
kidding. It
DR> has all you need. Its free as well, no strings
DR> attached. I don't know what the hell your
problem is,
DR> but stop.

You can see me as confused as you are.


So tried to give some input. I spend about 30 min -
okay it's
Sunday, so it was a little bit easier to find the
time. But
after posting my oppinion you started with this
stupid "trolling"
arguments ?

Maybe it is because:


and you only wanted to place a marketing message ?
Sorry for this but then you should have written your
first message
with other words and not asking for "input on it".


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[Rando Christensen]

lothar_troll was complaining, not me.

This was my point. Lothar has no obligation to fix bugs in this software
just because he wants to complain about them. A lot of open source
zealots love to pull this card, saying "stop complaining or fix it
yourself and send the author a patch", and it's pretty annoying.

Hell, I'd go so far as to say that complaining about someone else's
software without doing anything about it is one of the fundamental
god-given rights of any programmer.

 

[Lothar Scholz]

Hello David,

DR> Maybe I should have specified any input except
DR> trollish input.

DR> WideStudio was designed to work on the T-Engine.

Okay i looked at the t-engine.org website and read

http://www.t-engine.org/maker/T-EngineFAQ.txt

But this does not answer any questings about the WxStudio widget set
or the project.

Why did the WxStudio project die when there are so many companies
behind the T-Engine. I mean the T-Engine Forum looks like a "Who is
Who in the IT Industry". This is one of the most important questions
if you want to revive any project ! And this is not a trollish
question.

 

[David Ross]

I personally think they were redesigning the GUI
toolkit and making it better on the embedded
platforms. Take a look at the differences between far
back release and this release. Ex. the scrollbars look
exactly like Xt on the old version, the new ones are
redesigned. Also, the scrollbars have this neat
feature I like, when you click, it goes all the way
down to the bottom of the screen.*which is good for
embedded devices, maybe even useful on desktop* I am
not 100% sure why, but code was changed and added. Big
improvements were made on it.

Its obviously a good toolkit to use for portability,
good UTF8 support, and ease of use(dispite the little
tiny things).

The license is a big issue, LGPL and GPL make it
extremely difficult to use in proprietary
applications. MIT or free equivalent is better. That
way you do not have to say in documentation that you
are using it(unless you want to). I dislike being
forced to do things, I will however tell that I use
Widestudio because it doesn't hold a knife to my neck
if I do not.

The fact that it is for embedded systems made me most
interested. Other toolkits are based just on the
desktop and are very unstable on embedded systems,
WideStudio nor its toolkit has given me any trouble.

--David Ross



--David Ross

Hello David,

DR> Maybe I should have specified any input except
DR> trollish input.

DR> WideStudio was designed to work on the T-Engine.

Okay i looked at the t-engine.org website and read

http://www.t-engine.org/maker/T-EngineFAQ.txt

But this does not answer any questings about the
WxStudio widget set
or the project.

Why did the WxStudio project die when there are so
many companies
behind the T-Engine. I mean the T-Engine Forum looks
like a "Who is
Who in the IT Industry". This is one of the most
important questions
if you want to revive any project ! And this is not
a trollish
question.


--
Best regards, emailto:
scholz at scriptolutions dot com
Lothar Scholz
http://www.ruby-ide.com
CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP,
Python IDE 's

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[H. Simpson]

Lothar,

Maybe you should put a disclaimer stating that you are selling a
competing product at the top of messages criticizing free software in
the same category as your product. I'm not accusing you of bias or
anything, I just believe it's better to let people know about any
conflicts of interest so they don't get the wrong impression when they
find out later. They might misunderstand your good intentions to keep
us informed and decide not to buy from you...

[SNIP]
And there is no theming to change this, looking at the
code shows me that there will be no theming for a very long time
because the drawing code is deeply buried in the source files.

Under the "Options" menu, there's a "Look and Feel" submenu that brings
up: standard1, standard2, modern1, modern2, classic1, classic2

[SNIP]
So i think it is good that this is a dead project. Don't waste your
time to try to work with this toolkit.

Why do you think it is a dead project? Saying it is dead, doesn't make
it so.

The latest release is 3.80-3 which was released July 25, 2004. Here's
the last dozen entries from the release history.

# 25/07/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.80-3)
# 13/07/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.80-2)
# 01/07/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.80-1)
# 03/06/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-10)
# 02/06/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-9)
# 18/05/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-8)
# 21/03/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-7)
# 29/02/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-6)
# 21/02/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-5)
# 20/02/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-4)
# 22/01/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-3)
# 13/12/2002 Released WideStudio(v3.20-1)

Here are my impressions about Wise Studio 3.80.

There are many widgets and many options for each widget. You can move
and resize widgets using the mouse and watch their properties update in
real-time while doing so. Not too shabby for a free IDE that supports
c/c++, perl, and ruby.

The main complaint I have is the size of executables when linking
statically. A hello world window application statically linked was
2.7MB while the dynamically linked was only around 100KB (but requires
widestudio runtime DLLs). This was using the included GCC/MinGW32 c++
compiler.

I haven't tried yet but maybe using the free Optimizing c++ compiler
from Microsoft will produce smaller executables (VC++ Toolkit 2003 v1.01).

There's an option to store GUI components in files for loading/use at
runtime (as opposed to keeping them inside executables) but I haven't
explored that yet.

I'd love to see something like this for Fox Toolkit.

 

[Gavin Sinclair]

It's not a competing product though. An IDE (a GUI program) is a very
different thing from a GUI framework.

Still, a link to his product in a .sig is not going to do anyone any harm.
Nor will some better judgement from those who hand out troll awards so
freely.

Gavin

Lothar,

Maybe you should put a disclaimer stating that you are selling a
competing product at the top of messages criticizing free software in
the same category as your product. I'm not accusing you of bias or
anything, I just believe it's better to let people know about any
conflicts of interest so they don't get the wrong impression when they
find out later. They might misunderstand your good intentions to keep
us informed and decide not to buy from you...

[SNIP]
And there is no theming to change this, looking at the
code shows me that there will be no theming for a very long time
because the drawing code is deeply buried in the source files.

Under the "Options" menu, there's a "Look and Feel" submenu that brings
up: standard1, standard2, modern1, modern2, classic1, classic2

[SNIP]
So i think it is good that this is a dead project. Don't waste your

time to try to work with this toolkit.

Why do you think it is a dead project? Saying it is dead, doesn't make
it so.

The latest release is 3.80-3 which was released July 25, 2004. Here's
the last dozen entries from the release history.

# 25/07/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.80-3)
# 13/07/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.80-2)
# 01/07/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.80-1)
# 03/06/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-10)
# 02/06/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-9)
# 18/05/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-8)
# 21/03/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-7)
# 29/02/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-6)
# 21/02/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-5)
# 20/02/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-4)
# 22/01/2004 Released WideStudio(v3.70-3)
# 13/12/2002 Released WideStudio(v3.20-1)

Here are my impressions about Wise Studio 3.80.

There are many widgets and many options for each widget. You can move
and resize widgets using the mouse and watch their properties update in
real-time while doing so. Not too shabby for a free IDE that supports
c/c++, perl, and ruby.

The main complaint I have is the size of executables when linking
statically. A hello world window application statically linked was
2.7MB while the dynamically linked was only around 100KB (but requires
widestudio runtime DLLs). This was using the included GCC/MinGW32 c++
compiler.

I haven't tried yet but maybe using the free Optimizing c++ compiler
from Microsoft will produce smaller executables (VC++ Toolkit 2003
v1.01).

There's an option to store GUI components in files for loading/use at
runtime (as opposed to keeping them inside executables) but I haven't
explored that yet.

I'd love to see something like this for Fox Toolkit.

 

[James Britt]

This was my point. Lothar has no obligation to fix bugs in this software
just because he wants to complain about them. A lot of open source
zealots love to pull this card, saying "stop complaining or fix it
yourself and send the author a patch", and it's pretty annoying.

While I sort of tend to CTBW (code talks, bullshit walks), I agree.

I've worked in more than one place where management had an interesting
way to delegate responsibility. If you saw a problem, or thought of a
way to maybe improve things, and actually spoke up, you were "rewarded"
by being put in charge of making the change, or researching the details,
or some other task that amounted to more work but no more money.

You can imagine how effective that turned out to be.


James

 

[Sander Jansen]

Not impressed either.... BUT since I had nothing to do, I added to my GUI
widget comparison page at the FOX Community wiki page. Feel free to add or
fix any entry's.

http://fox-toolkit.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Widget_Comparison

Sander

 

[David Ross]

That is a really nice comparison chart. One question
though, What about the widgets that each has that FOX
doesnt? There are more Widgets than just those.
(*hehe) --David

Not impressed either.... BUT since I had nothing to
do, I added to my GUI
widget comparison page at the FOX Community wiki
page. Feel free to add or
fix any entry's.

http://fox-toolkit.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Widget_Comparison

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[Sander Jansen]

There are certainly more widgets than whats there (even within FOX itself).
But its a lot of work, and most people are probably only interested in the
most basic widgets. If you think something is missing, feel free to add
it....

Note that I think I was fairly generous in putting some of these WideStudio
widgets next to the FOX widgets ( FXIconList <->WSCverbList )....


Sander

 

[jim]

Okay i downloaded the 100 MB Win Installer and played a bit with
wsbuilder. I must say that this toolkit can win the second price in
the most ugly toolkit competition (the first is for the all time
winner FLTK).

Wow. I am suprised to hear that. I always thought of FLTK as
a fast and lean toolkit. Can you explain more.

Jim

 

[Lothar Scholz]

Hello jim,


jfo> Wow. I am suprised to hear that. I always thought of FLTK as
jfo> a fast and lean toolkit. Can you explain more.

"Fast and lean toolkit" and "nice and beautiful" are different things.
Right ? FLTK is the first but not the second. Thats what i said.

FLTK 2.0 has some theming support (don't know how much and which
quality) but FLTK 2.0 is as far away as GNU HURD.

 

[Bill Atkins]

I think you've got a poor understanding of the (L)GPL, buddy. You can
make any changes at all to a (L)GPL application without having to
submit it back to the project owner. The only stipulation the GPL
makes is that if you release your project to the public, there has to
be a way for someone to get the code.

Maybe you'd understand it a little better if you didn't spend so much
time calling people trolls because they have an opinion contrary to
yours.

Bill

lothar_troll was complaining, not me. I always fix
things on my own and submit. This is one of the
reasons I like the BSD license, I can submit only the
changes I want. Which when I have a piece of code that
is a bad hack that I do not want to submit, I don't
have to. --David Ross

Please don't do this. Just because a project is
open-source does not
mean people have to try to fix it themselves before
complaining about
how broken it is.

-----------------------------------------
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trolls deserve to be slammed
good people deserve respect
dross [at] yahoo .{d0t} c0m



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[David Ross]

I think you've got a poor understanding of the
(L)GPL, buddy. You can
make any changes at all to a (L)GPL application
without having to
submit it back to the project owner. The only
stipulation the GPL
makes is that if you release your project to the
public, there has to
be a way for someone to get the code.

Umm, no. Also, read the other email I just sent to the
other thread about the reverse engineering. I like
having at least some protection from software
crackers. Please understand that some people protect
thier code. Its not a bastardous way, just a
protective one.

actually the (L)GPL makes you submit changes to the
libraries. As stated in the other GUI Thread. Please
read more.

I choose WideStudio so I wouldn't have to even touch
LGPL and so I could throw in all my anti-disassembly
code. I was pretty sure I made this clear on IRC
before, you just missed the conversation about it.
Thank you for your constructive input.

--David Ross




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[Rando Christensen]

actually the (L)GPL makes you submit changes to the
libraries. As stated in the other GUI Thread. Please
read more.

No. (L)GPL requires that you provide any modified source to whoever you
distribute the binaries to, not to the original author. If you're not
redistributing it (for example, if you're using it internally in your
company), this is not required.

 

[David Ross]

mm yes, I should have picked my words better, thanks
--David Ross

No. (L)GPL requires that you provide any modified
source to whoever you
distribute the binaries to, not to the original
author. If you're not
redistributing it (for example, if you're using it
internally in your
company), this is not required.

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[Austin Ziegler]

No. (L)GPL requires that you provide any modified source to whoever you
distribute the binaries to, not to the original author. If you're not
redistributing it (for example, if you're using it internally in your
company), this is not required.

Mmm. You're both wrong, in that Rando's statement is incomplete. The
LGPL also requires that one provide a relinkable target for statically
linked binaries. That is, one must deliver the .lib files as well as
the .exe so that the person who then wants to further modify the
LGPLed library may then relink their modified version of the library
with yours.

-austin

 

[David Ross]

I rehashed in other email --David Ross

Mmm. You're both wrong, in that Rando's statement is
incomplete. The
LGPL also requires that one provide a relinkable
target for statically
linked binaries. That is, one must deliver the .lib
files as well as
the .exe so that the person who then wants to
further modify the
LGPLed library may then relink their modified
version of the library
with yours.

-austin

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[Paul Brannan]

Mmm. You're both wrong, in that Rando's statement is incomplete. The
LGPL also requires that one provide a relinkable target for statically
linked binaries. That is, one must deliver the .lib files as well as
the .exe so that the person who then wants to further modify the
LGPLed library may then relink their modified version of the library
with yours.

From what I understand, the purpose of that requirement isn't there so
that you can relink modified versions of the library, but rather so that
you can relink with a new version of the library when it is released.
I think this is perfectly reasonable; if a commercial application is
statically linked with an LGPL library that is found to have a serious
security hole, it is a good thing that I can download the new version of
the library from the author and relink.

(not that I've ever done this, but it's nice to know that I can).

Paul

 

[Bill Atkins]

It has nothing to do with picking your words wrong. You were wrong. Admit it.

Bill