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."
Borland is caught in the .NET.
.NET. If I were to perform any NEW windows centric development I would use C#. The good news though is C# Builder is AWESOME.
Delphi 8 and the VCL are nothing more than wrappers around
Just my $0.02
Yeah, Tk is great for quick prototyping. I've used it that way myself for years, and I very recently released some code for general use that was done that way. However, Tk is simply lower level and less polished than wxWindows. Tk has basic widgets that work which is fine for stuff I use myself or give to other developers, but I can recognize a Tk-based UI as such immediately on either Windows or Linux and that's a drawback. WxWindows has more advanced widgets that are indistinguishable from fully-native counterparts and can match the most polished professional applications. When I looked at a list of programs that used wxWindows (somewhere on the wxWindows site) I was actually surprised by some of them. I had used some of them, and it never occurred to me to wonder what framework they used. That's something I've never been able to say about any Tk-based UI, where the framework is in my face and many operations follow the framework model instead of the local UI standard unless someone has done a lot of per-application work to overcome the mismatch.
Yes, there are plenty of packages that attempt to "raise the semantic level" of Tk-based UIs, from grouping radio buttons to providing automagical tabbed dialogs with built-in scrolling canvases and checkbox tree controls. Follow that approach to its logical conclusion, and what do you get? WxWindows. Why use Tk plus this plus that with a little bit of the other and a whole bunch of your own time sanding off the rough edges, when somebody on the wxWindows team has probably already done it? Sure, you have to learn a little bit about how they did it, but that's really no harder than learning how to do it yourself with Tk, and the next programmer has a better chance of understanding what wxWindows did than what you did. Do you want to spend all of your programming time dicking around with character-set issues and varying focus/selection semantics on multiple platforms, or do you have other kinds of problems you'd rather be solving? I know I'd rather not get bogged down writing UI workarounds just to have something that's not butt-ugly. I have better things to do with my programming time.
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