Re: Should WinBinder be developed in Qt?

Hello, On 10/19/2004 10:14 PM, Rubem Pechansky wrote:

Yes, it does run natively, but I think Wez was talking about the look and feel - what makes the difference between win32 app and GTK app.

Hmmm... this doesn't make much sense to me, sorry. If Qt runs natively then both look and feel must be perfect. The difference is clear with PHP-GTK, because if you use the Windows theme it may *look* like Windows (within limits) but it doesn't *feel* like Windows at all. I still don't know whether Qt is native or not.

Right, it is my impression that Qt applications preserve the native look and feel of Windows applications instead of emulating it like PHP-GTk and Java Swing based applications. This is confirmed by a FAQ answer in the Qt site: http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faqs/mfcmigration.html#q13

Anyway I'm not defending the Qt approach, but I think Manuel's opinions (are you following this discussion?) are very respectable. I must tell you that I'm not a big fan of ther idea of changing everything at this point, but when it comes to Open Source and PHP I must listen to the most experienced among you. This is one of the big advantages of opening the source code!

My opinion is just my opinion, not the necessarily the only one that is right, even less the only one that you should listen. Anyway, my recommendation towards Qt arise from the fact that it is the toolkit of choice of several relevant Open Source and commercial projects like KDE or Skype Voice Over IP ( http://www.skype.com / ). In the case of Skype it seems that it made viable to develop a very successful multiple-platform Voice Over IP solution with much less effort than if they had choose to use platform specific toolkits. This made viable developing versions not only for Windows and Linux but also Mac OS X and Pocket PC and probably Palm OS based devices later. I believe this helped Skype becoming an increasingly adopted VOIP program. Despite non-Windows users are a minority, in fact a certain "love" for their platforms of choice certainly helped in spreading the word about the wonders of this program. For instance, I know for a fact that there are companies selling Linux support services via voice using Skype. Anyway, I have to agree with Wez that wxWindows is a more convinient toolkit for your extension precisely for the reasons that he mentioned. There is indeed a certain "alergy" in the Apache/PHP world to anything licensed as GPL for good reasons. Personally I find it ironic that GPL fanatics insist on the expression "free software" when in fact the GPL license is so restrictive that the the word free is used in the most deceptive context. This reminds me of a curious episode when a GPL fanatic using a @fsf.org address mailed me complaining that the PHP Classes site states in the subscription page that subscribing to the site is free. He wanted me to remove the word free as if FSF people have a certain rights over that word. It is very hard for the world to take GPL/FSF fanatics seriously when they come making such ludicrous demands. ;-) Anyway, back to the topic, despite wxWindows license is LGPL, my bottom line is: Qt: -1 wxWindows: +1 -- Regards, Manuel Lemos PHP Classes - Free ready to use OOP components written in PHP http://www.phpclasses.org/ PHP Reviews - Reviews of PHP books and other products http://www.phpclasses.org/reviews/ Metastorage - Data object relational mapping layer generator http://www.meta-language.net/metastorage.html