As Jeff mentioned, we have indeed examined wxWindows in the past. It
didn't seem quite ready enough for us to make a committment to it.
However, their current stuff looks very neato.
I think it's probably too late for us to make a switch. "If it works,
don't mess with it", right? :-)
> I think projects like AbiWord are leading the way for cross platform
> development, but we need to look at the big picture by encouraging
> the use of tools that will benefit all XP developers. I believe that can
> be done with available tools, without compromising the quality of
> the resulting applications.
In my experience, this doesn't seem to be true, yet. Cross-platform
tools and solutions are just not the panacea that we all wish they
could be.
I see very few conceptual obstacles to making this idealistic world
view a reality. After all, the standard C library is quite portable.
Extending the same concept to GUI and graphics is clearly a much
harder problem, but surely not an impossible one.
However, I've been doing XP development for a very long time. I
haven't seen a silver bullet yet.
I concede the attractiveness of your point: As Open Source projects,
if we all collaborated together on XP technologies and tools, we would
make more forward progress on reaching the common goal we both want.
However, I don't yet agree with your belief that we can currently do
so "without compromising the quality of the resulting applications."
Or, at the very least, I doubt we can do so without compromising the
*schedule* of those applications.
I'll end this note with a challenge: From the point of view of
AbiWord, wxWindows can be treated as a platform. Why not write a
wxWindows implementation of the "platform-specific" portions of
AbiWord? I don't think anyone on the core team has time to tackle
that task right now. However, we've made it pretty darn easy to write
new platforms. And, the Win32 version would probably make a nice
starting point.
A sufficiently motivated person who wanted to claim that wxWindows
could make our other platform implementations obsolete could certainly
try to prove it. :-)
-- Eric W. Sink, Software Craftsman eric@abisource.com