On 15 Apr 2002 at 9:39, Brad Pepers wrote:

> On Monday 15 April 2002 07:37, Paul Schmidt wrote:
> > On 14 Apr 2002 at 0:21, mmenaz wrote:
> > > I would prefer having community support Marathon open source
> > > project instead. http://www.alanti.net/firebird/marathon/ Don't
> > > waste efforts in 34 half working projects, please. Marathon could
> > > be "our" powerful tool, the Firebird programmer first choice.
> > > Thanks Marco Menardi
> >
> > I agree, we need to pick one or two projects, and concentrate our
> > efforts into getting those projects working 100%, with the features
> > in them that people want.
>
> The problem with most of the tools available right now is that they
> are all very Windows specific which is a pain for a database which is
> available for more than just Windows. The cross platform options
> available are:
>
> 1. Java. I still find this very slow going and its often not
> installed on Linux systems (and likely most other Unix systems) so it
> makes it a pain to get Java based tools running. Largest range of
> platform though.

It's often not installed on *any* system, simply because you need a T1 to down load
enough stuff to make it useful....

> 2. Kylix. I'm not sure if this is available for other Unix systems
> like FreeBSD and I'm not sure if its available for the Mac. Also its
> not a common programming language on any Unix/Linux system so you
> won't find a lot of Linux programmers that know Kylix. But the
> Windows programmers would likely be more at home with this.

The problem with Kylix is it runs only on Linux, there are other Pascals available but
whether they emulate a monster like the VCL and you could get a tool like IBO or
FIBPlus to compile on them without spending a gazillion hours on it is another
thing.....

> 3. Qt. This is available for pretty much any Unix system and also
> Windows and Mac. There is a free version but I'm not sure what
> limitations it has. >From what I understand the free version is
> available for Linux and Windows and you can create free software with
> it but I don't think there is a free Mac version.

I think QT is free on some platforms*nixes, but only for non-commercial
development, last I heard it wasn't available on the Mac, but there is no Mac OS-9
and under FB client, so that's probably not an issue. Since OS-X is based on
FreeBSD, I would guess that most unix stuff would run.....

> 4. Others? There are other gui toolkits available like wxWindows but
> I don't have much experience with them to comment on what platforms
> they work on or how complete they are.
>

I don't know either looks like wxWindows might be a good option, I want to get a
copy , it looks really interesting..... for the days when MFC stands for Microsoft's
Flipping Crapshoot. Okay, some people might think of another word instead of
flipping, but I don't like that kind of language....

The best tool would be something that's as platform agnostic as possible....

Paul



Paul Schmidt, President
Tricat Technologies
paul@...
www.tricattechnologies.com