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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>