[linux-audio-dev] Re: Kylix - Linux-audio-dev

9 May 2003

Hi,

...
   Qt can also be
developed using a WYSIWYG style editor called 
 QtDesigner.  If you go ahead and compile QtDesigner with the KDE 
 classes, you can use the KDE widgets for that style of editing as well.

Qt designer looks cool but it does not have a compiler mode to compile
and debug from it. It is not really a true IDE or RAD tool for
development. It is very very close to Kylix though if they just had the
ability to compile and develop within it. 
No QT designer is just the "wizard", it needs to be accompanied by an 
integrating environment.

...

  Christian is right - Qt beats MFC hands down. 
MFC was a nightmare for  MFC is the biggest pile of crap I ever used. I hate it 1000
times more
than I hate GTK. At least GTK is free, so I won't rag on it. I just did
not like the way GTK works at all. But MFC was just pure bullshit. 
:-) heart warming

...

When I mean RAD tools, you really had to use Borland C++ Builder.
Imagine the ease of Visual Basic but with C++. That is how it was like.

If you ever used Visual Studio .NET it's alot like the C# Windows forms
stuff. Drag, drop, point, click, write code, compile, run, whoopee! Next
part.

I love GCC but all the kits are just too painful for using it for GUIs
so far. Way too hard and awkward to use. I like the ease of Visual Basic
but with the power of C++. Kylix/Borland Builder does this so nicely
you'll flip when you use it and find out how powerful it is. And it
isn't a mickey mouse solution either, it is really a very powerful API
attached to it to do really advanced GUI work in C++ or Delphi. 
Yeah, this has been the culprit for me many times also. I just don't have the 
time/stamina/whatever to do something other than GUI-less tools without a 
good IDE.
Professionally I write a little in Java right now, and I think the tools 
available there are lightyears ahead of the current stock of tools for C/C++ 
(especially compared to the ones available in Linux). Java IDE's like 
Idea(costs money) is just sooooooo complete.

As for Kylix, I did try it once but for some reason never got around to do 
anything serious with it, I think it's because it is something of an outsider 
in the opensource community...dunno..

I've done my fair share (more than that probably) of searching for good 
development tools under Linux.
As for full IDE's there are currently three IDE's that I think deserves 
mentioning.
http://anjuta.org
http://eclipse.org
http://kdevelop.org

Where I have used anjuta for a C based project and was very pleased with it 
for a while, but it was still to buggy, so I stopped...

Eclipse is IBM's javabased super-all-in-one, now opensourced master-meta IDE 
that will(and does) support everything and the kitchen sink ranging from 
atoms to atombombs.
The C++ part of Eclipse is rather primitive as of yet though, and it doesn't 
support any GUI tools. The java part is really cool though and I've used it 
several times for smaller projects.

My personal favourite of the bunch is Kdevelop. I've done a C++ projekt in 
Kdevelop a few years ago (no gui) and it worked rather well. 
A new version of kdevelop is under heavy development, 3.0, this release seems, 
on the drawing board to be extremely well equipped for C++ projects, 
especially if you are doing gui-based development with QT or KDE toolkits. I 
haven't tried it myself, but kdevelop IS supposed to integrate with QT 
designer, I'm not sure how much is already finished though...
I've tried the alpha releases with varying degrees of success ;)

My testbench is to try and import MusE's source code and try to browse through 
it and get it to compile from inside the IDE. Mostly works now :)

...

What I am wondering about is the License to Kylix. Where is it? I am
guessing that is why it has not been adopted more by OSS people. 
You are talking about the 'free' version of Kylix right? I think all libraries 
that you make with that are GPL, correct me if I'm wrong. And the founding 
reason for that is probably because Kylix's GUI-toolkit is based on QT (!), 
which in it's free form is GPL.
As for not so much adoption in the OSS community, I think it's simply because 
it isn't true OSS by itself.

But I DO think it's a great tool, and Kylix DOES support C++ right? 
If it fits your bill, go ahead and use it!
If you provide binaries for your projekt then people only need the 
runtime-environment and, though big, isn't as big as the whole of Kylix :)

Personally I'm waiting for Kdevelops latest generation :-). Probably forever 
;)...

Regards,