Giuliano Colla wrote:
Micha Nelissen ha scritto:
Ever thought of applications which receive data from a number of
external sources and should display them and react accordingly? They
outnumber the applications where a user just sits there and plays with
mouse. And they're commercial application which need a good solid
software, and a pleasant look. I'm talking of application where the
input devices are a combination of network connection plus barcode
readers, badge readers, electronic scales, access controls, etc. etc.
You find them in POS, in hotels, in company stores, in cash dispensers,
in taxi companies, in airports, wherever. The multiple sources require
multithreading, and fast response to external events, combined with fast
update of display, and with human interaction.
There's no RAD worth mentioning today to provide the GUI for all those
applications.
Giuliano
This is of particular interest to me and can vouch for Giuliano says. I'm
working up a prototype re-write of our existing POS software currently written
in Delphi 6. I did a couple of subjective tests a while back trying to simulate
how fast screen painting would be in a lazarus app on windows and linux.
One test was simply a group box with room enough for 48 buttons which I tried
creating on the fly as well as design time and setting .visible property on or
off as needed. This is a common widget in p.o.s., an area of buttons that are
painted and repainted as the user navigates through entering a sale and
selecting products, side dishes, modifiers, etc. Lazarus on Windows seems
pretty fast. In Gnome on CentOS4 it was just about but not quite as fast as
Windows(xp). Definitely acceptable from those simple tests. Both computers
were p4 2ghz 512 RAM with 64 MB shared video/ram, btw.
Another, non point of sale example, is a control panel app that I wrote against
the Asterisk PBX which shows real time status of all phone extensions,
conferences, queues, parked callers, etc as well as can be programmed to send
customer commands to transfer callers between extensions, conference rooms, blah
blah blah.
http://www.datatrakpos.com/pos/datatalk/maestro.aspx
It was an interesting project (using D6), but synchronizing the asynchronous
events coming in from Asterisk and updating the GUI was a real challenge for me.
--
Warm Regards,
Lee
"If I don't see you around here, I'll see you around, hear?"
_________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
"unsubscribe" as the Subject
archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
