Just a short note: fpGUI is currently being redesigned, to get more flexible regargind Theming and data linking (for database widgets etc.). Maybe it will be even possible to use it from C or other languages very soon.
fpGFX, the graphics layer behind fpGUI, will make a major step forward within the next few days. Stay tuned...
IIRC COM will be supported on Linux as a kind of subset of Corba.
Not really; from the compiler's point of view there are only two differences between COM and CORBA interfaces: 1. COM interfaces must be derived from IUnknown 2. CORBA interfaces can be derived from several ancestors (some kind of multiple inheritance)
COM consists of two parts: The IUnknown stuff, and a helper library. Translating the helper library to Linux isn't that many work, if only the really important part is ported.
But of course it would be possible to provide a COM to CORBA wrapper, but Free Pascal won't see full CORBA support in the near future so we'll have to see...
KDE/Qt support cannot be done easily, as this are C++ libraries. Free Pascal doesn't support C++ specific things such as C++ classes, C++ exceptions or templates yet, so the only way to go is to use a special C wrapper. (Free Pascal of course supports classes and exceptions, but they are not binary compatible to C++. BTW, what _is_ C++ binary compatiblity...? Each platform and each compiler has a different solution.) Although this works (I successfully tried it over a year ago), it is a quite inefficient and not very comfortable solution. I recommend to use GTK, until an new special (Free Pascal specific) platform-independend GUI toolkit is out...:)
So it will be windows-only. I got the impression, that you intend to support COM cross-platform.
I don't think so, but I really am not sure (I'm not into Windows nor into Delphi style programming, so I'm not the best person to answer this:)
I think some basic COM stuff will be supported on other OSses, at least IUnknown and the most important COM library interfaces. Full COM support won't make very much sense; as you said, CORBA is a much better replacement.
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Just a short note: fpGUI is currently being redesigned, to get more flexible regargind Theming and data linking (for database widgets etc.). Maybe it will be even possible to use it from C or other languages very soon.
fpGFX, the graphics layer behind fpGUI, will make a major step forward within the next few days. Stay tuned...
- Sebastian
Not really; from the compiler's point of view there are only two differences between COM and CORBA interfaces:
1. COM interfaces must be derived from IUnknown
2. CORBA interfaces can be derived from several ancestors (some kind of multiple inheritance)
COM consists of two parts: The IUnknown stuff, and a helper library. Translating the helper library to Linux isn't that many work, if only the really important part is ported.
But of course it would be possible to provide a COM to CORBA wrapper, but Free Pascal won't see full CORBA support in the near future so we'll have to see...
KDE/Qt support cannot be done easily, as this are C++ libraries. Free Pascal doesn't support C++ specific things such as C++ classes, C++ exceptions or templates yet, so the only way to go is to use a special C wrapper. (Free Pascal of course supports classes and exceptions, but they are not binary compatible to C++. BTW, what _is_ C++ binary compatiblity...? Each platform and each compiler has a different solution.) :)
Although this works (I successfully tried it over a year ago), it is a quite inefficient and not very comfortable solution. I recommend to use GTK, until an new special (Free Pascal specific) platform-independend GUI toolkit is out...
I don't think so, but I really am not sure (I'm not into Windows nor into Delphi style programming, so I'm not the best person to answer this :)
I think some basic COM stuff will be supported on other OSses, at least IUnknown and the most important COM library interfaces. Full COM support won't make very much sense; as you said, CORBA is a much better replacement.