On 19/01/2008, Damien Gerard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Projects work on these 3 platform without any defines, and they are > quite complex. And the current LCL solves those issues too. > So what fpGUI brings to me ?
When we started using LCL just over 2 years ago we had lots of issue. GTK1, GTK2 and Win32 were all at different levels of stability. This made it near impossible for use to develop software to run consistantly under Linux and Windows. Our goal was not to have IFDEF's in our code (which we had in Delphi and Kylix) and due to our clients (250+ franchisees with 20+ computers each) being able to run Linux and Windows side-by-side things needed to work the same. LCL didn't fulfill either of those goals. We split our development team in two. One half developing under Linux and the under half under Windows. This would have ensured our product always ran the same on both platforms. We picked up many issues in the components from not being able to set background colors on forms (this worked under Windows but not under Linux) to not resetting colors on components (still a issue in mantis) etc.. We fixed many issues or found workarounds to them. Some issues we couldn't fix. Our product wasn't overly complex either. We simply tried to do want we always did under Delphi and Kylix, but couldn't. Then another issue was having our code being broken after getting svn updates. No fault of the Lazarus developers! :) At which point we decided to find a permanent solution. We evaluated a project I started (fpGUI) to see if it could work for us. After a month of prototyping we got the green light with fpGUI. Our product now behaves in a consistant manner under all platforms, it looks almost native under Win98, Win2000 or WinXP (with original theme). We now have full control over painting components, so can make it look exactly like we want. Soon we will implement full theming support to detect GTK2, KDE and Windows XP themes. fpGUI has been a great success for use. And best of all, we still get to use Lazarus (IDE portion, not LCL). As a side note: We did ask many of our clients what they thought about a product not looking 100% like the OS. They didn't mind at all. There is no consistant look under Linux anyways. Plus if Microsoft can bring way out UI's to the masses (all Office versions, Windows Media Player etc...) and everybody is fine with it, why can't we. At least ours looks a lot closer to the native OS look. As for the feel of the application - their answer was that if it acts or behaves in kinda the same way its fine. And these were all answers from end users, not developers. Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ _________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
