I'm been reading a few topics on this board, and it does bring the question to my mind, as to if all of the IDE choices are fixed for wxWidgets, and there is no more room for any new development of an IDE? Or is the potential field still wide open for a wxWidgets IDE & Rad Tool?
I'm just curious what all of you think.
===========
And, yes, before anybody denigrates me by looking at profiles/info on other sites, I am the person trying to modernize wxWorkshop, and at the same time, fixing another wxWidgets IDE project to extend further than wxWorkshop for the OSS community. I am going to keep working on these projects simply because I do see a good need for them in my own future, so any any opinions expressed here is not going to get me to quit work on my projects. And, yes, I know the argument of spending the time instead on other existing Projects, but I have my reasons to go with my own, which I will share in another thread if anybody asks me.
Is there any room for more wxWidgets IDE?
-
metalogic
- Super wx Problem Solver
- Posts: 307
- Joined: Fri Oct 08, 2004 8:21 am
- Location: Area 51
- Contact:
Well if you look aroud in this forum you will see one of my posts where I almost had a coronary when I saw yet another anouncement for a new IDE.
In case you don't find it, it boils down to my deep dissapointment that every few weeks someone starts a new IDE project which has virtually a nil chance of ever succeeding. At the same time, all the existing projects struggle to get enough of a critical mass.
So I guess my opinion has already been strongly expressed.
That said, I'll bite: What's your reason?
In case you don't find it, it boils down to my deep dissapointment that every few weeks someone starts a new IDE project which has virtually a nil chance of ever succeeding. At the same time, all the existing projects struggle to get enough of a critical mass.
So I guess my opinion has already been strongly expressed.
That said, I'll bite: What's your reason?
- Santiago
http://www.metalogicsw.com
http://www.metalogicsw.com
Hi!
I'd say there's plenty of room for new IDEs. In fact I started one of my own some time ago (http://wxwidgets.solidsteel.nl/viewtopic.php?t=2426).
The main reason was that I wanted a designer that suits my needs. The problem realy is time. I would develop it further, but I have none. I could make it open source, but I'm afraid the code is a mess and execept from laughing at me, I suppose the only response would be that people don't understand what I did. I have problems to fully understand the code myself
I guess the best way to do it would be a complete new start with a set team. The main problem is that everybody works for themself on something.
I would be better to gather a team of interested people and then start work on something completely new, maybe borowing some code for old projects where it's applicable.
I like the thought of having a open source wxWidgets GUI designer someday. When the designer part is finished and ported it would be cool to turn it into a complete IDE by adding support for different compilers etc...
I'd say there's plenty of room for new IDEs. In fact I started one of my own some time ago (http://wxwidgets.solidsteel.nl/viewtopic.php?t=2426).
The main reason was that I wanted a designer that suits my needs. The problem realy is time. I would develop it further, but I have none. I could make it open source, but I'm afraid the code is a mess and execept from laughing at me, I suppose the only response would be that people don't understand what I did. I have problems to fully understand the code myself
I guess the best way to do it would be a complete new start with a set team. The main problem is that everybody works for themself on something.
I would be better to gather a team of interested people and then start work on something completely new, maybe borowing some code for old projects where it's applicable.
I like the thought of having a open source wxWidgets GUI designer someday. When the designer part is finished and ported it would be cool to turn it into a complete IDE by adding support for different compilers etc...
OS: OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Win XP Pro
wx: svn
Compiler: gcc 4.5.1, VC 2008, eVC 4
"If it was hard to write it should be hard to read..." - the unknown coder
"Try not! Do. Or do not. There is no try." - Yoda
wx: svn
Compiler: gcc 4.5.1, VC 2008, eVC 4
"If it was hard to write it should be hard to read..." - the unknown coder
"Try not! Do. Or do not. There is no try." - Yoda
-
metalogic
- Super wx Problem Solver
- Posts: 307
- Joined: Fri Oct 08, 2004 8:21 am
- Location: Area 51
- Contact:
upCASE wrote:I'd say there's plenty of room for new IDEs.
upCASE, you are proving my point. As long as we keep starting new IDEs that's all we'll ever get, "starts". Whereas if we collaborate on existing ones, even if each developer ever only spends a week of their life on the project, it grows. If you spend a week on a new project and then abandon it, you come up empty handed. Sure there is "room" for new IDEs (whatever that really means), it's not like there is a physical limit to how many IDE projects we can have in the universe. It's really about whether we are wasting our time.upCASE wrote:The problem realy is time. I would develop it further, but I have none.
I couln't disagree more here. Look around, there are already many promissing projects that could use another set of hands. There's of course wxDevCPP although it is unfortunately not cross-platform. There is also wxFormBuilder which looks great and there are many many more.upCASE wrote:I guess the best way to do it would be a complete new start with a set team.
I really can't understand why someone would start all over instead of giving a hand to the wxFormBuilder guys for example.
Well, isn't that what you are advocating by promoting the creation of yet more IDEs?upCASE wrote:The main problem is that everybody works for themself on something.
Disclaimer:
I have the deepest respect for upCASE and he always helps out everyone here. I just happen to strongly dissagree on this topic. It's not personal, just academic.
- Santiago
http://www.metalogicsw.com
http://www.metalogicsw.com
True indeed, they are promising. I myself use wxGlade most of the times.metalogic wrote:I couln't disagree more here. Look around, there are already many promissing projects that could use another set of hands. There's of course wxDevCPP although it is unfortunately not cross-platform. There is also wxFormBuilder which looks great and there are many many more.upCASE wrote:I guess the best way to do it would be a complete new start with a set team.
I really can't understand why someone would start all over instead of giving a hand to the wxFormBuilder guys for example.
The reason why one would start a new project is IMHO, to combine the best of all these existing designers. I like wxGlade beacuse it creates good code and is nice to handle, but I dislike the interface. wxFormBuilder handles sizer based design, but not "free-hand" (last time I chekced). wxDev-C++ does this, but
1. it's not x-platform like you said
2. it currently supports only one compiler
So, you are right that there are many existing ones that are really good and promising, but implementing all features could prove to more work then starting a new project and reuse the code that's allready there.
Nope.metalogic wrote:Well, isn't that what you are advocating by promoting the creation of yet more IDEs?upCASE wrote:The main problem is that everybody works for themself on something.
I said "start a new one with a set team". The main mistake I made (that's why wxRapid won't get to far the way I see it now) is that I didn't team up with others. I would, however, join in in a team to develop something new. Get a team, plan, develop, that's the best way I see.
No offense taken and thanksmetalogic wrote: Disclaimer:
I have the deepest respect for upCASE and he always helps out everyone here. I just happen to strongly dissagree on this topic. It's not personal, just academic.
It would be a realy sad world to live in if we always agreed
OS: OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Win XP Pro
wx: svn
Compiler: gcc 4.5.1, VC 2008, eVC 4
"If it was hard to write it should be hard to read..." - the unknown coder
"Try not! Do. Or do not. There is no try." - Yoda
wx: svn
Compiler: gcc 4.5.1, VC 2008, eVC 4
"If it was hard to write it should be hard to read..." - the unknown coder
"Try not! Do. Or do not. There is no try." - Yoda
A lot of good points...
Guys,
Let me preface my remarks here as being just my own opinions. I do not represent myself as any sort of authority or expert. I do have a lot of experience in embedded hardware/software design, but I don't expect you guys to just take my word on it, so I'll just ride along as another one these posters nobody knows anything about.
You bring up a lot of good points, and I do see a common theme you guys come up with. I have to agree with both of you about "that every few weeks someone starts a new IDE project which has virtually a nil chance of ever succeeding". I certainly don't want metalogic to have a coronary, but I would be interested in as to his reasons into why these projects have no chance of suceeding. I'll give my reasons further down in this post.
upCASE hs some really good points too IMO. Yes, I've seen the problem that nobody has time to sometimes even start the project they've set out to do, or you have a complete turnover of people on a project, or a lot of political reasons (I include the "everybody works for themself on something" as part of the political reasons), which is really sad. A lot of potentially projects went by the wayside before anyone could get any benefits from them.
I see the point also being made about "there are already many promissing projects that could use another set of hands". While that is true, I have discovered that for that to succeed, the another set of hands have to be able to get along with the rest of the existing team, and totally agree with the philosophy and implementation already set forth by the team in order to contribute. It is a very rare team in which that can happen, as egos and agendas most always gets in the way of collaboration. And a lot of these projects started up on some really bad assumptions and methods and found that it was unworkable, or unrealistically time consuming, or that nobody wanted anything to do with what they were doing. Nobody likes collaborating on a project where they can't have a say, or where they get totally ignored when they're trying to contribute something.
"I really can't understand why someone would start all over instead of giving a hand to the wxFormBuilder guys for example." Oh, I can...speaking as someone who has looked into wxFormBuilder and decided against it. For me, the tool doesn't do everything I want it to do, has a specific philosophy that I would keep fighting when using it, and it is just about completed meaning I would have a very uphill fight for any suggestions I might have to help improve it. Its a lot less hassle for me to start my own than to start undertaking a potential political battle. A compromise may be reached, but there are simply some things I know I can't compromise on. I can state the same Opinion for CodeBlocks and wxDevCpp. Now, please, don't take this as a slam on my part against wxFormBuilder, CodeBlocks, wxDevCpp, etc. as I can see and respect that the people working on them has put in a lot of time and effort into the products, and has made a really nice product that I'm sure does well for a lot of users. That's great in my book.
Now as to my reasons of why I'm reviving/modernizing wxWorkshop....let me begin by why I think wxWorkshop failed (anybody more knowledgeable please hop in here). I think there are some good lessons learned here:
1. Feature Creep. During the course of development of wxWorkshop, a lot of new and nifty ideas got thrown into wxWorkshop, and actually got mostly implemented....However, the basics weren't completed and tested fully yet. Without the basics working, in my view, you're never going to get the advanced ideas working on top of the non-working basics which I've got to believe caused a lot of frustration for a lot of the Developers.
2. No clear enforcement of any coding standards...each module done by each programmer was done in a totally different style, which also makes the code very hard to maintain....much less someone new coming onto the project and trying to carry on. It would have been helpful if some of the Developers had taken time to even just comment the code.
3. Politics.....The scope of the project was changed by the Project Admin (I should say perceived) as he was going to take wxWorkshop as a paid commercial product for his software company. I would say this was one of the major reasons the Developers left this project....nobody would want to contribute their work just so somebody else could just take it, close it up, and make money off of it while they see nothing back (no credit, no money). It doesn't appear that wxWorkshop made it commercially (if it was ever released commercially...I don't know), but wxWorkshop lost a lot of Developers, and development came to a stop.
Now, to some of my reasons of wanting to revive or fork wxWorkshop:
1. Most Important: I NEED THIS TOOL.
2. I NEED THIS TOOL.
3. wxWorkshop comes closer to the way I want to develop my code than any of the other projects I've looked at.
4. wxWorkshop seems to have been the simplest implementation of a wxWidgets IDE then I've seen from the other Projects. What I mean here is that when I look at the other projects, I see more spiffy libraries, interpreters, scripts, more languages, and other modules being implemented in the projects...even before a lot of the projects have released ANY code/binaries. wxWorkshop has at least released some demo/alpha code that used to work (and hopefully I will have it work again). Also, because of the fewer modules in it, it is easier to figure out what the program is generally trying to do even without comments.
5. wxWorkshop, while still having a Windows bias, appears to me to be closer to a Universal application for all platforms that wxWidgets supports rather than to feel like a Windows program ported to everything else. I know that is a hard concept for anybody who has only run Windows and nothing else. I think it is easier to keep wxWorkshop as a Universal App than the other projects I've seen, and easier to remove the small number of Windows only programming biases sections I've found. I want a Universal IDE & RAD tool.
6. I think wxWorkshop will fit into my future plans with some other implementations once I can get it fully operational again.
So, with the above in mind, I am determined to follow the development of this tool through, and it is important enough to me that I am making the time to work on it. Realistically, it will probably be a year or more before I get it up & running all the way even though it is compiling now with wxWidgets-2.6.2, and almost edits a file in Windows (it has some bugs keeping it from bringing up the Editor Window in Linux, that i am fixing now). I've been working on it for the past 2 months, and I intend to keep on it....and it doesn't matter to me if this turns out to be a tool that only myself uses, or if others start using it. Maybe that is the difference between me and those who start a project for the fun of it, and don't have a real commitment to it.
Oh, something else to consider btw. wxWorkshop still has politics associated with it....enough to where I've forked off the code to my own project which is where I do the work on it now and send the changes back to it once I have some significant changes implemented. Alas, no project is ever free of the politics I'm afraid.
Regards to all of you. Be kind to me please.
Let me preface my remarks here as being just my own opinions. I do not represent myself as any sort of authority or expert. I do have a lot of experience in embedded hardware/software design, but I don't expect you guys to just take my word on it, so I'll just ride along as another one these posters nobody knows anything about.
You bring up a lot of good points, and I do see a common theme you guys come up with. I have to agree with both of you about "that every few weeks someone starts a new IDE project which has virtually a nil chance of ever succeeding". I certainly don't want metalogic to have a coronary, but I would be interested in as to his reasons into why these projects have no chance of suceeding. I'll give my reasons further down in this post.
upCASE hs some really good points too IMO. Yes, I've seen the problem that nobody has time to sometimes even start the project they've set out to do, or you have a complete turnover of people on a project, or a lot of political reasons (I include the "everybody works for themself on something" as part of the political reasons), which is really sad. A lot of potentially projects went by the wayside before anyone could get any benefits from them.
I see the point also being made about "there are already many promissing projects that could use another set of hands". While that is true, I have discovered that for that to succeed, the another set of hands have to be able to get along with the rest of the existing team, and totally agree with the philosophy and implementation already set forth by the team in order to contribute. It is a very rare team in which that can happen, as egos and agendas most always gets in the way of collaboration. And a lot of these projects started up on some really bad assumptions and methods and found that it was unworkable, or unrealistically time consuming, or that nobody wanted anything to do with what they were doing. Nobody likes collaborating on a project where they can't have a say, or where they get totally ignored when they're trying to contribute something.
"I really can't understand why someone would start all over instead of giving a hand to the wxFormBuilder guys for example." Oh, I can...speaking as someone who has looked into wxFormBuilder and decided against it. For me, the tool doesn't do everything I want it to do, has a specific philosophy that I would keep fighting when using it, and it is just about completed meaning I would have a very uphill fight for any suggestions I might have to help improve it. Its a lot less hassle for me to start my own than to start undertaking a potential political battle. A compromise may be reached, but there are simply some things I know I can't compromise on. I can state the same Opinion for CodeBlocks and wxDevCpp. Now, please, don't take this as a slam on my part against wxFormBuilder, CodeBlocks, wxDevCpp, etc. as I can see and respect that the people working on them has put in a lot of time and effort into the products, and has made a really nice product that I'm sure does well for a lot of users. That's great in my book.
Now as to my reasons of why I'm reviving/modernizing wxWorkshop....let me begin by why I think wxWorkshop failed (anybody more knowledgeable please hop in here). I think there are some good lessons learned here:
1. Feature Creep. During the course of development of wxWorkshop, a lot of new and nifty ideas got thrown into wxWorkshop, and actually got mostly implemented....However, the basics weren't completed and tested fully yet. Without the basics working, in my view, you're never going to get the advanced ideas working on top of the non-working basics which I've got to believe caused a lot of frustration for a lot of the Developers.
2. No clear enforcement of any coding standards...each module done by each programmer was done in a totally different style, which also makes the code very hard to maintain....much less someone new coming onto the project and trying to carry on. It would have been helpful if some of the Developers had taken time to even just comment the code.
3. Politics.....The scope of the project was changed by the Project Admin (I should say perceived) as he was going to take wxWorkshop as a paid commercial product for his software company. I would say this was one of the major reasons the Developers left this project....nobody would want to contribute their work just so somebody else could just take it, close it up, and make money off of it while they see nothing back (no credit, no money). It doesn't appear that wxWorkshop made it commercially (if it was ever released commercially...I don't know), but wxWorkshop lost a lot of Developers, and development came to a stop.
Now, to some of my reasons of wanting to revive or fork wxWorkshop:
1. Most Important: I NEED THIS TOOL.
2. I NEED THIS TOOL.
3. wxWorkshop comes closer to the way I want to develop my code than any of the other projects I've looked at.
4. wxWorkshop seems to have been the simplest implementation of a wxWidgets IDE then I've seen from the other Projects. What I mean here is that when I look at the other projects, I see more spiffy libraries, interpreters, scripts, more languages, and other modules being implemented in the projects...even before a lot of the projects have released ANY code/binaries. wxWorkshop has at least released some demo/alpha code that used to work (and hopefully I will have it work again). Also, because of the fewer modules in it, it is easier to figure out what the program is generally trying to do even without comments.
5. wxWorkshop, while still having a Windows bias, appears to me to be closer to a Universal application for all platforms that wxWidgets supports rather than to feel like a Windows program ported to everything else. I know that is a hard concept for anybody who has only run Windows and nothing else. I think it is easier to keep wxWorkshop as a Universal App than the other projects I've seen, and easier to remove the small number of Windows only programming biases sections I've found. I want a Universal IDE & RAD tool.
6. I think wxWorkshop will fit into my future plans with some other implementations once I can get it fully operational again.
So, with the above in mind, I am determined to follow the development of this tool through, and it is important enough to me that I am making the time to work on it. Realistically, it will probably be a year or more before I get it up & running all the way even though it is compiling now with wxWidgets-2.6.2, and almost edits a file in Windows (it has some bugs keeping it from bringing up the Editor Window in Linux, that i am fixing now). I've been working on it for the past 2 months, and I intend to keep on it....and it doesn't matter to me if this turns out to be a tool that only myself uses, or if others start using it. Maybe that is the difference between me and those who start a project for the fun of it, and don't have a real commitment to it.
Oh, something else to consider btw. wxWorkshop still has politics associated with it....enough to where I've forked off the code to my own project which is where I do the work on it now and send the changes back to it once I have some significant changes implemented. Alas, no project is ever free of the politics I'm afraid.
Regards to all of you. Be kind to me please.
-
metalogic
- Super wx Problem Solver
- Posts: 307
- Joined: Fri Oct 08, 2004 8:21 am
- Location: Area 51
- Contact:
spicerun,
You are improving an existing project (wxWorkshop) not starting a new one from scratch. I'm all for that. I think that's wise so it does not qualify for a coronary
Best of luck to you and hopefully with the renewed activity, it will catch the attention of more developers.
You are improving an existing project (wxWorkshop) not starting a new one from scratch. I'm all for that. I think that's wise so it does not qualify for a coronary
Best of luck to you and hopefully with the renewed activity, it will catch the attention of more developers.
- Santiago
http://www.metalogicsw.com
http://www.metalogicsw.com
Thanks.metalogic wrote:spicerun,
You are improving an existing project (wxWorkshop) not starting a new one from scratch. I'm all for that. I think that's wise so it does not qualify for a coronary
Best of luck to you and hopefully with the renewed activity, it will catch the attention of more developers.
Actually though, I'm improving an existing project, AND creating 2 new projects. The code I'm forking will end up not quite resembling wxWorkshop when it is finished, and the other one will be a general purpose IDE for any platform. The IDE itself will be written using wxWidgets (Yeah I know, I'm a glutton for punishment.
) .Got to admit though that all my projects have some existing code for a starting point. (Wonder how well received though my rewrite of wxGlade in C++ will be received? No existing C++ code there.).
Regards.