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The following is a proposal by the wxWindows developers. We hope to
attract some interest and help for this project, to ease the situation
for application developers who are currently in the difficult decision
to chose whether to support KDE or GNOME.
Please understand that we do not favour either of them, nor do we want
to get involved in a discussion about the pros and cons of KDE vs
Gnome. We are simply interested in helping application developers
(such as ourselves) to live with the existing situation. If you are
not interested in that, just ignore this post.
Proposal for a port of wxWindows to Qt - wxQt
Following the recent discussions
and flamewars about KDE vs Gnome, we got worried that we'll see a
repetition of the same damaging infighting from which Unix has
suffered before. Competition is a good thing, but the current
situation leaves application developers with a difficult decision to
make: Write for KDE, using qt/harmony or write for Gnome, using GTK?
Whatever happens to these projects, we will end up with a lot of
duplicated efforts and a mix of applications written for either of the
two environments. The result will not be the consistent look and feel
that both projects aim for.
The people on the wxWindows developers team thought that we might have
a solution for this problem, if we can get some outside help to get it
done. Let us explain: wxWindows is a cross-platform development
toolkit, a library of C++ classes which provide GUI concepts as well
as other cross-platform issues such as container classes, debug
features or configuration management. It has been around since 1992
and started by supporting Motif, XView and MS-Windows, with a direct
X11/Xt port added later. Last year, a major rewrite was started and we
now have a much advanced library, available for MS Windows, with a
Motif port under construction. Later last year, Robert Roebling set
out on a one-man project to build wxGTK, a gtk-based implementation of
wxWindows which in less than a year has become sufficiently stable to
use it as the main development platform of rather large
applications. The wxWindows license is a variant of the LGPL,
which should meet no objections from the free software community. In
fact, this has been an open source project long before the term became
commonly used.
Our idea is, that if this is good enough to work across different
operating systems (a MacOS port is under construction, too), it could
easily bridge the gap between KDE and Gnome. The quick evolution of
wxGTK has shown that a new port based on an existing widget set or
toolkit can easily be created by a small team within a few
months. Therefore, we would like to start a project for a Qt/Harmony
based wxWindow library, wxQt. It would then be possible for
application developers to write the same source and compile it either
for KDE, Gnome or even any of the other supported systems.
But for this we need help. The core developers are all pretty busy on
the existing ports, but we could provide significant help and support
for any such effort. A wxQt port could also recycle lots of existing
code from the other ports.
Please, join us in this effort and, if you feel that you could
contribute, join the wxWindows developers mailing list for further
discussions. Just send a mail containing "subscribe" to
wxwin-developers-request _at_ x.dent.med.uni-muenchen.de
You can find some more information about wxWindows at the following
places:
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/julian.smart/wxwin/ wxWindows homepage
http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~wxxt/ wxGTK homepage
http://Ballueder.home.ml.org/wxWindows/wxQt.html wxQt proposal (this text)
http://Ballueder.home.ml.org/M/ home of M, an email
client developed using wxGTK, containing several screenshots of how
wxGTK actually looks like
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Karsten Ball$B|d(Ber http://Ballueder.home.ml.org/ mailto:Ballueder _at_ usa.net
Physics Department, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, Scotland
"In a world without fences, who needs Gates?"
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