Thoughts about a cross-platform IDE written in wxWidgets...

HallerbachJ · Post by **HallerbachJ** » Sat Sep 18, 2004 2:53 pm

There are a lot of very good free IDE's around, Dev-Cpp, MinGW-Developer Studio, Eclipse, BCBX Personal Edition...

But they all have a big drawback:

Dev-Cpp is available only for Windows. By the way, thanks to gururamnath for implementing a RAD-design tool for wxwidgets!
Dev-Cpp is written in Delphi and noone knows about the future of Kylix, which seems to be the only possibility to make Dev-Cpp cross-platform.

MinGW-Developer studio is lacking of a good GUI-designer and the source code is not available.

Eclipse is written in Java, hm, okay, that isn't that worse but I think that a C++-IDE should be written in C++

The same can be said about Borland C++BuilderX, no longer an option for me, because they dropped their wxWidgets support

So what remains?

There is a wxWorkshop, which seems to be dead since 2002, and wxHatch.

What I would like to see is a DevCpp or MingW-Developer Studio written entirely with wxWidgets. Isn't that a nice idea? With some cool RAD-features and that neat stuff, that one is used by Visual Studio .NET.

So, don't get me wrong - one could say, go and write your own IDE but that would only be another 50 - 80% completed but never finished solution.

But if a larger group of people would start the ultimative wxWidgets-Developer-Studio project, this could really be a great thing. Take a look at KDevelop, for instance.

Okay, enough said...

Just a few thoughts of a developer, still searching for the ONE IDE

McCabe · Post by **McCabe** » Sun Sep 19, 2004 8:17 am

I agree, this would be nice. You wouldn't need different project files depending on the current os, the interface would be familiar etc.
imho, the best thing to do is to join in on an available open source project. I don't know if one like this exists though? Perhaps CodeDragon/wxStudio is still alive or could be brought back to life?

/linus

asp · Post by **asp** » Sun Sep 19, 2004 3:16 pm

I agree too!

Do you know how to compile wxStudio under win32? The install document doesn't give many details.

eros · Post by **eros** » Sun Sep 19, 2004 3:46 pm

That is one of the ultimate problems here, everyone has their own IDE, we don't

subnet_rx · Post by **subnet_rx** » Mon Sep 20, 2004 6:07 pm

well, I don't think this is as necessary as just getting it to run easily in most of the major IDE's. DevCpp was easy for me, but I still don't have it working in Visual C++ .NET

If you had a WYSIWYG for wxWindows, I think you'd have the same problem that people have with Visual C++, they can create a window, but have no idea how it really works.

Post by **Ryan Norton** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 7:20 am

subnet_rx wrote:well, I don't think this is as necessary as just getting it to run easily in most of the major IDE's. DevCpp was easy for me, but I still don't have it working in Visual C++ .NET

If you had a WYSIWYG for wxWindows, I think you'd have the same problem that people have with Visual C++, they can create a window, but have no idea how it really works.

wxDialogBlocks is pretty nice for creating windows/dialogs, but it isn't that great of an IDE.

In fact, nothing really compares well to MSVC 6 as an IDE. That's not even taking into account MSVC Express - and when you throw in the crazy intellisense features (which wx macros still manage to mess up) like autocompletion for macros, a bar to the left indicating which part of a file changed... etc. etc., nothing really is in that same planet as it. I would for an IDE like that for OSX (please please please have correct auto-indentation!!!).

In terms of people not knowing how to create a window - one of the problems with wx is that you need to be pretty advanced (read - years of c++ experience) to even begin to understand it. That's the problem - people from MSW/MSVC can just create most of the basic stuff from the IDE and it streamlines well with the main code (dialogblocks does ok with this - but not as good as msvc), thus making MSW usable for beginners.

The point of course being that there isn't too much room for beginners in wx land (the kind of beginners that don't know/don't want to know how to programmatically create a window) - as MSVC is easy for users from Visual Basic to move over to from its interface/IDE - and wx doesn't really have that as a stepping stone.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 8:07 am

I thought pretty much the same lately... The thing is that at my work we often use both FORTRAN77 and C as programming languages - I'm known around here as the C++ geek

. It would be great if I had an IDE which can highlight any language syntax (in Scite-style), configurable with any kind of compiler, and with support for plug-ins (being those GUI designers for wxWidgets or whatever people want to add). But this is, at the moment, a bit of an utopy...

Post by **Jorg** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 8:26 am

It would be really great if there was THAT-ONE-IDE that would really give the user every advantage it has with wxWidgets. I think even FOX has it's own IDE. It would really make life easier for a lot of programmers also newbies in wxWidgets where there would be no more project setting problems between IDE's, compiler flags, etc etc. That ONE-IDE that is supported in the community and everyone can work with.

The reality is that a lot of users prefer their own editor, prefer make on the command line etc. You can hardly satisfy everybody and maybe the best way to build or maintain such an IDE is creating it modular where the Editor, Compiler, Debugger, Class Explorer, GUI designer are seperate DLL / .so modules which interact with eachother. When the set of interfaces is defined properly and the framework (mdi/undo/redo/plugin) management is done properly, people can hook in a different kind of editor when they prefer a different editor module with more features then the standard one.

If you don't do that you are just one of the many IDE's which do not match up completely because everybody has their own way of doing things.

Such a framework would be a bliss. Maybe it is up to the wxWidgets community to make the IDE framework only, and up to the wx-users to make the seperate modules to fill it in

Just my 2 ct's

- Jorgen

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 8:44 am

Jorg wrote:It would be really great if there was THAT-ONE-IDE that would really give the user every advantage it has with wxWidgets. [...]

You can hardly satisfy everybody and maybe the best way to build or maintain such an IDE is creating it modular where the Editor, Compiler, Debugger, Class Explorer, GUI designer are seperate DLL / .so modules which interact with eachother. [...]

Such a framework would be a bliss. Maybe it is up to the wxWidgets community to make the IDE framework only, and up to the wx-users to make the seperate modules to fill it in

- Jorgen

I'm all for it!
Would anybody else like to start working on that?
And I don't think I'm being hasty or irrational about it... I've waited for such an IDE for a long time, it's about time a bunch of people get together and work on it, for the simple reason that it would be so generalized that absolutely anybody who codes would find use for it... even if you've never heard of wxWidgets.
Besides, it's exactly the kind of publicity wxWidgets, as well as the C++ programming language, need!

Post by **upCASE** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 11:03 am

Hi!
It's definitly a great idea and worth to start working on it.
I guess the problem was that before there was no forum and normaly something like an IDE doesn't get planned and discussed on a mailing list like in a forum.

So, as far as time and knowledge allow: I'd be happy to help

Post by **Jorg** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 11:28 am

For a while now I have been thinking about a framework for my own app which will be the successor of wxCRP. It also needs an editor, kind of project view, and will contain ways to auto generate code, ease up the build process etc. So a framework which can be used the way I described would be really great! And yes I would like tp participate as well ofcourse.

If there is enough interest, I can try to set up a wiki page on which we can make a concept document online by collaborating about it. This would be the ideal way to transform ideas into something usable.

ps. If this is a good idea, I have problems using MediaWiki. Something with php session errors. Are there any other Wiki's which might support multi user editing and sql ? A nice way to go is to crystalize this concept and go from there.

cg · Post by cg » Tue Sep 21, 2004 4:31 pm

The real problem is that any large project requires capital. Open source is definately not exempt of this fact. I'm sure if you look at any free or open source project you will find that this is a primary factor in a project coming live and staying alive.

My 2 cents.

CG

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 4:43 pm

Well, something which is also true in any lasting open source project, is that the best part of the income only comes but much later, when seriously interested companies donate. As far as I can see, the closest IDE to the one we would try to make is Eclipse, which still suffers a bit from Java slowlyness. All things considered, if we could provide the community with a highly modular IDE, it would be both easily manageable and expandable, thus making it interesting and probably worth a lot of peoples' two cents.

We shouldn't worry so much about that for now...

Post by **Jorg** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 4:55 pm

The real problem is that any large project requires capital. Open source is definately not exempt of this fact. I'm sure if you look at any free or open source project you will find that this is a primary factor in a project coming live and staying alive.

Well, you have to see it like this. If the framework for the IDE is solid enough, then people have more time to develop good components for it. Wouldn't it be great if there is one file manager / undo/redo manager / plugin manager / project browser that can load a variety of plugins to let the user work with it as an IDE ?

For example, the framework manager will take care of picking the proper plugin registered for the file, and load it in a tab window. There can be a variety of different plugin types like:

- Text editor
- Code generator
- GUI editor
- Project manager
- Build manager
- Task / todo manager

If the framework is well tought, light weight and managing all plugins and their traffic properly, then it can be very powerful. You start with a simple text editor plus the framework, later on someone writes a GUI editor for it, all that needs to be done is glueing all those modules together in a logical workflow for the user. This requires some thought but it can be very powerful.

Don't worry we're not going to steal away your market ... Like I said there are already a lot of IDE's present, the power will be creating the framework where people can write extensions for.

For a long time I wanted to create a PROJECT/TASK/TODO manager. But one that is aware of the project tree and files I am editing. So when I am entering TODO items, it knows what file is open, and what line the cursor is at. For debugging and testing this is ideal .. This is one of the many module examples.

What about maybe even a module that will do the publish process of your project. With that I mean searching / replacing i.e. a version tag you use, update some dates in the about box, generating that list of changes in the new changelog, building the whole thing, zipping it up, and sending it by FTP. Stuff like that would be priceless to have.

If all those modules can work together by defined paths and a big object model managed by the framework, then you have a really powerful IDE. It will allow i.e. a diagram editor module to look in your project environment, get the files, or ask the related scanner module to give back the class outlines to create diagram structure, and ofcourse the other way around, insert code when people insert code into the diagram. If all those actions are well defined, and supported, then the modules are interchangable.

This framework would be the start of a good and ofcourse very flexible IDE. Everything I wanted to write as application had one thing in common. A project file manager environment, programming and some kind of automation. This common thing would be that one IDE.

Wow I just kept on rambling

gotta fly now there is a climbing wall waiting with my name on it !

Regards,
- Jorgen

eros · Post by **eros** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 5:34 pm

cg wrote:The real problem is that any large project requires capital. Open source is definately not exempt of this fact. I'm sure if you look at any free or open source project you will find that this is a primary factor in a project coming live and staying alive.

Ehm... what about wxWidgets itself?, isn't open source?.

So my guess is that open source projects does not pers