Subject: re: Abiword for Macintosh
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Feb 04 2000 - 21:48:07 CST
Far be it for me it tell others how to spend their time and dream their
dreams but the cross platfrom GUI toolkit market is already really
crowded.
There is GTK, QT, wxWindows,Tk and Jx for a start.
Now I'm sure that each of these has deficiencies that new Toolkits may
overcome however in the case of GTK, QT and Tk, all three have very large
and very active developer communities constantly improving their
deficiencies. All three have demonstrated that is is possible to develop
large scale, sophisticated GUI applications with them.
Also since abi is GPL licensed any library linked with abi must also be
released as GPL code too.
Regarding abiword becoming embedable, I certainly hope it will be possible
to imbed abi into GNOME applications and for GNOME applications to be
embedable into abi, however I don't know if the scheme for doing this has
been worked out. GNOME has bonobo for application embeding but I believe
there is a problem working out how to make bonobo cross platform which is
a major goal of abi.
On the other hand the QT guys impressed a lot of people by porting mozilla
from motif to QT in a week. If you guys have that sort of product you
should go for it and port abi, provided you don't mind GPLing your
toolkit!
Martin Sevior
On Fri, 4 Feb 2000 crawford@goingware.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> While I can certainly attest to the fact that PowerPlant is a quality API and is real
> nice to work with, it is not free software, and I don't think you want you want the
> entanglement of having to link all that commercial code into your copylefted
> product.
>
> Also it is highly Mac specific.
>
> If you need a GUI framework that is open source and will work cross-platform, I'm
> working with one that the author plans to open source. Can't say much about it
> yet except it's real nice, and it supports MacOS, WIndows, XWindows and the
> BeOS. I think it's better designed than powerplant.
>
> Mike
>
>
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