Hi gEDAns, I'm one of the developers of Fritzing. I know I'm coming to this thread rather late but I have a few comments and clarifications...
First, I think some of the initial debate and criticism was based on looking at our old (archive.fritzing.org) web site that had a bunch of early stuff that is completely obsolete. This first "proof-of-concept" version of Fritzing was written using Java on top of multiple Eclipse frameworks and for expediency we hacked up a quick output to Eagle. While the demo was cool, it quickly turned into an unpleasant experience for coders as we reached the limitations of the GUI framework (not to mention the problems of being dependent on proprietary CAD tools). So, last summer we threw all the old code out and started over from scratch. We decided to go with Qt for aesthetic as well as technical reasons. For us, it makes coding C++ almost as easy as working in a higher level language, while still giving us every increment of speed that we want. It has support for 90% of what we need without external libs. Docs are great. It's very portable; we release on 4 platforms with just a few ifdefs. We looked at easily a dozen different GUI frameworks before chosing Qt. We don't really see Fritzing as competing with the other open source/free EDA tools. Our target audience is largely hobbyists, students, designers and artists: essentially, non-engineers. Our long-term goal is to support file interchange with other EDAs, especially gEDA and KiCAD so that as users reach the limits of what is possible with Fritzing, they can move their project over to more professional tools. With that in mind, it would be great to collaborate. I'm currently working on a gEDA/PCB footprint importer to take advantage of the great library that you guys have. I also have "export to gEDA" on my list as it would be really great to be able to export a netlist that gnetlist can understand. Please feel free drop in on our forums to give us comments, critique and code. Although we don't use gEDA as a backend, I've learned an awful lot by reading your code, docs and discussions. It's great stuff! Brendan Howell http://fritzing.org _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user