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I have been musing about the possibility of a
commercially developed and marketed Rapid Application Development Environment
(i.e. Delphi) using GTK+ (and possibly support for GNOME widgets) as the base
widget set. This may not be the forum to ask the following questions, but here
goes anyway (I AM SURE FLAMES ARE SOON TO FOLLOW :):
1) Does the LGPL license that GTK+ is distributed
under prohibit the creation of a closed source object oriented wrapper library
(say in C++ or a hand crafted object oriented scripting language) This library
would be used by a RAD IDE to provide a method to rapidly create applications
for Linux/Unix and be supported and maintained.
2) If the answer to question one is no, and
the library is considered a "derivative work", if the wrapper library is
released under the LGPL (say like GTK--) can the IDE be released under a closed
source licence? (I Like this option better since it would allow open source
development using the wrapper library, while only costing money when developers
wanted to use the RAD IDE, IMHO much more flexible)
I have been thinking on this subject since there
seems to be no well supported, professional quality RAD IDE for GTK+/GNOME, and
GNOME seems like it will be the predominant desktop environment for
Solaris/Linux (and possibly other unix vendors). I have been developing on
Linux/Solaris with GTK+ for 2+ years now and REALLY would like such a tool. I
have also developed on windows 5+ years and have gotten quite accustomed to
tools like C++ Builder/Delphi (and also MFC (YUCK!), although the only thing
Visual about Visual C++ is the code you see when you type it!). If companies are
ever to port their desktop apps to Linux, they need tools windows
developers will be comfortable with. If they have to hand code everything
and the learning code is too high, they will most probably decide that the ROI
for such a port is very well not worth the effort (I am speaking from actual
experience here!).
Oh, I have looked at GLADE, Boa Constructor,
Lazarus, VDK Builder, wxGTK (not a RAD environment, a toolkit), etc ...
The problem with these tools, even though most of
them accellerate certain parts of the development cycle (and do what they do
very well), is that NONE provide the level of RAD
development capability that almost ALL of the windows RAD tools do. Most, not
all, exclude integrated debugging, integrated help, context
sensitive help, etc...
Thanks in advance,
Carl
FLAMES MAY START NOW, I GOT THICK SKIN !
:)
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