[Nottingham] Opensource devel environment?

[David Luff]

On 9/25/03 at 9:47 AM Colin Saxton wrote:

>From what I have seen the kde/qt environment for gui programming is
>moving towards a more standard multiplatform but you might consider
>using java!! Don't laugh everyone!
>
>Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org) is a great IDE with some professional
>plugins available for free...I would go as far to say that it is
>unbeaten when it comes to java development. IBM's new widget api is also
>more responsive than Sun Swing components and its starting to gain
>momentum on all platforms...
>
>You could write the core of your components using GNU C (KDeveloper is a
>good ide and its installed on most linux systems as standard) and then
>link into Java GUI using JNI.  If you have yet to use Java then now is
>the time...It can save an age in coding projects.
>
>Good Luck ;)
>

Hmm.  I've got no objection in principle to coding the gui in Java - really
it's a case of learning the class library rather than the language at the
front end IMHO, and I like to keep gui/os-interaction cleanly separated
from core code.  However, I certainly share Mr Davies reservations about
VM's.  From a user perspective, my currently favourite editor (jedit) is a
Java app, and requires jre >= 1.4 to get the mouse scroll wheel working.
At one point I wished to try out a soundfile editor written in Java, but
no-go, jre < 1.2 was specified.  There's just no way that two completely
unrelated, fairly non-complex apps shouldn't be able to co-exist.  From a
developer point of view, I want users of my software to double click
setup.exe and next a few times on windows, and simply type dpkg -i
my-statically-linked-app.deb on Linux, not have to visit sun/ibm/blackdown
to find and install an appropriate VM.  Just out of interest though, can I
integrate a Java front end with an ansi C++ back end.  I'm addicted to the
STL data structures and stream input/output - going to C is not an option!

I managed to get a wxWindows sample app compiling and running on Linux at
home last night and on W****ws at w**k this morning, and it seems pretty
promising - I'm going to give it a serious try out.  I'm sort of resigned
to having to save a few useful skeleton program templates and using
find-and-replace of the variable names in place of a code generation
wizard.

Thanks for the replies,

Cheers - Dave