Slashdot Mirror
Borland Uses (And Supports) wxWindows
jmccay writes " Back in September, Slashdot posted an article about a new tool that Borland is releasing (C++ BuilderX) which is a multi-platform and multi-compiler development environment. What wasn't mentioned in the article that I scanned in the post was that Borland is going to use wxWindows for this product. I have been working with wxWindows for about 6 months now, and I like it. A statement by Julian Smart (founder of the wxWindows project) gives more information on the product and Borland's participation in the wxWindows project. He says that they are also going to help out the project by 'contributing expertise and funding to help in areas such as enhanced run-time type information, the new build system and code reengineering, and will continue to invest in wxWindows while supporting its open source status.' There is also an FAQ available to read on the linked page. This is great news for both the project and the Open Source community as a whole."
I (as well as many others) code cross-platform GUIs in Tk - a rock solid C lib, available on Windows (down to CE), Linux, Mac, as well as many other Unix flavors. Source is wide open, and under the most free BSD-style license. Highly recommended.
Delphi is much more than a wrapper, and this is GOOD news in any case.
I much prefer delphi's wrapper to windows' API.
It's so much easier to do an OnKeyPress, =#13 than it is to look for WM_whatever on the right dlgitem in the dlgproc.
I think so anyway, and if wrapping .net means it is still Delphi, all the better.
As for wxWindows I am very pleased.
Well done Borland.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Zero lines of code to make something look native? That's all well and good, but you have to keep in mind Tk has sheer elegance going for it in code quality.
Compared with something beastly like wxWindows (which feels like an MFC/Java crossbreed from heck), Tk tastes great and is less filling. Perl::Tk kicks serious butt. Pick up the Oreilly Emu (Mastering Perl Tk) book and read it some time.
And it's not just for Windows and Linux. Tk is everywhere. And for nearly every language. Good stuff.
Too much emphasis is put on shiny things versus cool things. Tk is cool. And, don't know about you, but my Tk apps *ARE* shiny. (And not to mention I can write them faster).
Borland can't.
This is not a borland created product, is a very powerful and mature framework that is both open source and bussiness friendly.
Borland builder can be killed, but not wxWindows. I use it with mingw GCC and VC++ and I don't think I will change it anytime soon.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
I'm just a C++ student at the local community college, so I don't know a lot about the usefulness of the various other stuff it comes with, but I ordered the Personal edition on CD from shop.borland.com a few days after it was released, and have been in love with it from the beginning.
The textbook our class uses comes with CodeWarrior, which I can't stand, so I opted for BuilderX. All CDs of BuilderX I've seen (Personal and Enterprise) have installs for all the supported OSs on one disc (Win32, Solaris, Linux) and support whatever compilers you may want to use.
There doesn't seem to be much in the way of tools to design GUI programs, but I don't need that at the moment anyway. The Java-based UI is surprisingly fast, only slightly slower than the GTK+-2.0 port of Anjuta, which isn't nearly as stable as C++BuilderX.
All in all, for my $10(+$12.50 S&H) I'm quite pleased.
My one gripe would be the lack of documentation on the C Library functions. They're there, and you can of course use them, but no dox.
wxWindows is better than Qt from a Windows user's perspective, because wxWindows uses the native API calls, whereas Qt seems to merely draw the UI instead of actually calling it. Menus look very close to the real thing but are always off in tiny, tiny ways. It is never as good as actually just letting the OS do it for you. The Qt site spins this to say it could be faster. Yeah, I don't see how.
.NET because they are too afraid to take advantage of the language.
Qt's slot/signal mechanism is awesome. However, modern C++ compilers can do it without the additional compiler (use Boost/Loki).
I think that any C++ library should actually use the full gamut of C++ features instead of saying "we're going to worry about the platforms that don't support exception handling/namespaces/templates and just not use them at all." That seems like a great way to end up with MFC. It is 2003 people, lets at least code like it is.
Yes, I realize these features are not implemented everywhere. Perhaps someone should split away from the projects and start a comprehensive, powerful C++ abstraction layer that is for desktop application programming on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. I'm just tired of half-assed libraries getting the crap kicked out of them (comparatively speaking) from
I ended up working on a wrapper for Win32 because every cross-platform alternative ended up having an Achilles heel of some sort.