Re: What's wrong with VDKBuilder?

[Matthew Berg <galt gothpoodle com>]

On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Hassan Aurag wrote:

>  Actually that's my only question. The why of the question is simple. 
> Glade seems to be THE Gnome RAD, but I have found by accident that 
> VDKBuilder was excellent.
>
>  Actually, I found out about VDKBuilder in a slashdot post in response 
> to (I think) Miguel's comments about code-reuse.

VDK builder may very well be a fine tool, but it only generates C++, and
only for the VDK framework.  And, unfortunately, VDK does not ship with
major distributions at this point.  So it adds another dependency for the
end user to resolve.

Glade, on the other hand, will generate C, C++, Ada95, Perl or
Eiffel.  And the C++ toolkit that it generates for, GTK--, is shipped with
the major distributions, including Helix Gnome.

And beyond that, there is libglade, which allows you to use the XML
project files directly within applications. 

>  And while you are at it, why don't we use code-reuse. I mean it doesn't 
> have to be bonobo. How come each time the gnome-hackers start something, 
> they start it from scratch. Are all existing GPL'ed software crappy? Take 
> the gnome-admin project versus linuxconf. Helix-tools are still at 1% of 
> linuxconf's capabilities. Evolution is still at 25% of Balsa's. Actually 
> if Balsa folks used gtkhtml to show the messages, Evolution would be at 
> 5% of Balsa's power. 

The same could be said of Balsa in relation to Evolution's
functionality.  With Evolution you also get

  * virtual folders

  * html e-mail

  * support for additional types through bonobo 

  * scheduling

  * contact management
 
  * ldap integration

I've not looked at the Balsa codebase, but I would think it hard to add in
some of these features without re-writing large portions of the code.

Likewise with the Helix Setup Tools; they are being architectured to
support rollback, corba integration, cross-platform support, remote
administration, cluster administration, gnome control center integration,
etc. Most of which would be difficult to engineer into the current code
base.

Aside from that, Linuxconf has known issues with mangling manual additions
to configuration files. 

>  Gnome basic is the most ridiculously funny example on non-code reuse. 
> Heck, there is Python, and whatever you Gnome visual basic will become, 
> it would never be easier to learn/use than any visual python.

And whatever Visual Python becomes, it will not be compatible with Visual
Basic.  Which makes it useless in helping to port existing complex
documents to Linux.

>  Again, what's wrong with VDKBuilder? It's at 30% of Microsoft Visual C++ 
> power minus the templates wizards.

See above.

Matt