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VCF - A Free BSD Competitor To Trolltech's Qt?

Posted by simoniker on from the atari-vcf dept.

TioHoltzman writes "There's a new 0-6-5 release available of the VCF, aka the Visual Component Framework. This release has a slew of new features, and it looks like it could become a real contender against Trolltech's Qt toolkit. It currently runs on Win32 platforms with an active Mac OS X port underway. There's still lots to do, but it can run some of the samples now on OS X. There are some screenshots here (1), here (2), and here (3)."

8 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. But will it continue to run on Win32 by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Past Tomorrow?

    I hope it's just me, and the amount of work I've been doing lately on this subject- but XP with SP2 on any AMD processor won't even allow the Windows CE VM to execute in debug mode. What chance does a third party language/compiler/debugger have?

    --
    SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
  2. Re:Frameworks arent platform specific by jhunsake · · Score: 4, Informative

    Notice the space between "Free" and "BSD"? Notice that "To" is capitalized?

    Ok, then you should be smart enough to figure out that the title is really

    "VCF - A free BSD Competitor to Trolltech's Qt?"

  3. Missing a couple things? by JabberWokky · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Stuff like the application scripting language, data abstraction, relational database libraries, accelerated 3d, etc. Qt is a bit more than just a visual toolkit at this point, having pulled into it and made platform independant many of the ideas implemented in KDE.

    --
    Evan

    --
    "$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
  4. Re:What am I missing? by JabberWokky · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Yes, but Qt isn't a GUI toolkit, it is an application development framework and language extension (Database abstraction, application scripting, Signals and Slots, the foreach loop, etc). All I see here is a GUI toolkit. GUI widgets and layout comprise only a small part of what Qt is.

    --
    Evan

    --
    "$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
  5. Isn't this just WxWindows all over again? by FFFish · · Score: 4, Informative

    And doesn't Wx have the lead by, oooh, must be about five years?

    Of course, the biggest flaw with Wx is that its lead developer doesn't have the cojones to submit a Slashdot story as if he were an impartial user...

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  6. Re:It's not that I'm against advertising... by TioHoltzman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have tried 3 different times to get this story submitted in one way or the other for the past several months (including one earlier today that got rejected within less than an hour!). They have all been rejected. Several other members of the project have also tried repeatedly to get a submission and those too got rejected. I don't like doing this anymore than you do but it seems that's what it takes to get a submission accepted.

  7. Re:It's not that I'm against advertising... by eraserewind · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I have tried 3 different times to get this story submitted in one way or the other for the past several months (including one earlier today that got rejected within less than an hour!). They have all been rejected. Several other members of the project have also tried repeatedly to get a submission and those too got rejected. I don't like doing this anymore than you do but it seems that's what it takes to get a submission accepted.
    But you know, this isn't Freshmeat. It's a discussion forum. Maybe the fact that is was rejected 3 times should tell you something.

    The point release notifications of famous apps like Mozilla are bad enough, but some library we haven't heard of before that does the same as a bunch of other libraries out there?

    If the news that Mozilla or OpenOffice or something like that was switching to VCF then it might be newsworthy.
  8. Re:What am I missing? by TioHoltzman · · Score: 5, Informative

    In addition to the GUI stuff the VCF provides:

    • Thread support with Mutexts, Conditions, and Semaphores
    • File and file searching
    • Streams
    • Locale and Unicode support
    • Text codes
    • String messages for localizing your app
    • Registry wrapper for app prefs
    • A full fledged reflection API that is conceptually similar to the Java Reflection API. This allows for dynamically creating an object instance from only a class name, interrogating the instance for methods, properties, events, and interfances. The overhead for this is pretty minimal. You do have to register the class but this is pretty easy to do and doesn't require a separate pre-processor step like Qt's MOC does.
    • A event system that is very similar to delegates in .NET and extremely easy to use.
    • Simple XML parsing support
    All of this is plus, unlike Qt or WxWidgets, or FOX or whatever, the framework is broken into smaller pieces as opposed to one monolithic library. All of the above features are available in the FoundationKit and completely suitable for console/server developement, without any GUI baggage.

    Application scripting can be achieved by using the VCF's Reflection API's to wrap a script engine. For example, in one app I wrote I used the Mozilla JavaScript engine and made a VCF wrapper that simply hooked into the VCF's ClassRegistry. Thus any class that you registered with the VCF's runtime was also available for scripting with the JavaScript engine. Took about 200 lines of code. From what I have seen I would expect a Python wrapper to be equally easy to write.