| 1 | $Id$ |
| 2 | <br> |
| 3 | <H1>Proposal for a port of wxWindows to Qt - wxQt</H1> |
| 4 | <p> |
| 5 | Following the recent discussions |
| 6 | and flamewars about KDE vs Gnome, we got worried that we'll see a |
| 7 | repetition of the same damaging infighting from which Unix has |
| 8 | suffered before. Competition is a good thing, but the current |
| 9 | situation leaves application developers with a difficult decision to |
| 10 | make: Write for KDE, using qt/harmony or write for Gnome, using GTK? |
| 11 | Whatever happens to these projects, we will end up with a lot of |
| 12 | duplicated efforts and a mix of applications written for either of the |
| 13 | two environments. The result will not be the consistent look and feel |
| 14 | that both projects aim for. |
| 15 | <p> |
| 16 | |
| 17 | The people on the wxWindows developers team thought that we might have |
| 18 | a solution for this problem, if we can get some outside help to get it |
| 19 | done. Let us explain: wxWindows is a cross-platform development |
| 20 | toolkit, a library of C++ classes which provide GUI concepts as well |
| 21 | as other cross-platform issues such as container classes, debug |
| 22 | features or configuration management. It has been around since 1992 |
| 23 | and started by supporting Motif, XView and MS-Windows, with a direct |
| 24 | X11/Xt port added later. Last year, a major rewrite was started and we |
| 25 | now have a much advanced library, available for MS Windows, with a |
| 26 | Motif port under construction. Later last year, Robert Roebling set |
| 27 | out on a one-man project to build wxGTK, a gtk-based implementation of |
| 28 | wxWindows which in less than a year has become sufficiently stable to |
| 29 | use it as the main development platform of rather large |
| 30 | applications. The wxWindows license is a variant of the LGPL, |
| 31 | which should meet no objections from the free software community. In |
| 32 | fact, this has been an open source project long before the term became |
| 33 | commonly used. |
| 34 | <p> |
| 35 | |
| 36 | Our idea is, that if this is good enough to work across different |
| 37 | operating systems (a MacOS port is under construction, too), it could |
| 38 | easily bridge the gap between KDE and Gnome. The quick evolution of |
| 39 | wxGTK has shown that a new port based on an existing widget set or |
| 40 | toolkit can easily be created by a small team within a few |
| 41 | months. Therefore, we would like to start a project for a Qt/Harmony |
| 42 | based wxWindow library, wxQt. It would then be possible for |
| 43 | application developers to write the same source and compile it either |
| 44 | for KDE, Gnome or even any of the other supported systems. |
| 45 | <p> |
| 46 | |
| 47 | But for this we need help. The core developers are all pretty busy on |
| 48 | the existing ports, but we could provide significant help and support |
| 49 | for any such effort. A wxQt port could also recycle lots of existing |
| 50 | code from the other ports. |
| 51 | |
| 52 | Please, join us in this effort and, if you feel that you could |
| 53 | contribute, join the wxWindows developers mailing list for further |
| 54 | discussions. Just send a mail containing "<tt>subscribe</tt>" to |
| 55 | <tt>wxwin-developers-request@wx.dent.med.uni-muenchen.de</tt> |
| 56 | <p> |
| 57 | You can find some more information about wxWindows at the following places: |
| 58 | <ul> |
| 59 | <li>The <a href="http://web.ukonline.co.uk/julian.smart/wxwin/">wxWindows homepage</a>. |
| 60 | <li>The <a href="http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~wxxt/">wxGTK homepage</a> |
| 61 | <li>The <a |
| 62 | href="http://Ballueder.home.ml.org/wxWindows/wxQt.html">wxQt |
| 63 | proposal</a>(this text) |
| 64 | <li>The <a href="http://Ballueder.home.ml.org/M/">home of <em>M</em></a>, an email client developed using wxGTK, showing several <a href="http://Ballueder.home.ml.org/M/screenshots/">screenshots</a> of how it actually looks like. |
| 65 | </ul> |
| 66 | <p> |
| 67 | <hr> |
| 68 | Karsten Ballueder <tt><a |
| 69 | href="mailto:Ballueder@usa.net">Ballueder@usa.net</a> <a |
| 70 | href="http://Ballueder.home.ml.org/">http://Ballueder.home.ml.org/</a></tt> |