[Desktop_architects] Portland: The Linux DesktopIntegrationInterface

[Michael Sweet]

Brooks, Phil wrote:
> ...
> I agree with you that the library or widget set is not the issue.  The
> issue is that by choosing a library or widget set, I also dictate my
> customer's environment. ISVs are very reluctant to dictate environments
> to their customers because they get very mad at us when we do.

As an "old" ISV, we've had problems even back when there was "one true
toolkit" (Motif), as Sun would make incompatible changes to their Motif
distribution that broke custom widgets.

As an ISV, our GUI toolkit requirements include:

     1. Stable API
     2. Native (or similar) look-n-feel
     3. Basic UI widgets - buttons, lists, tabs, menus
     4. Ability to develop custom widgets
     5. Unicode support
     6. Static linking or stable, vendor-supplied shared libraries
     7. Cross platform (UNIX/Linux, MacOS X, Windows)
     8. Smaller is better
     9. License should allow for binary-only distribution.

We've looked at using KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK+, but neither provides 6,
7, or 8 on our list.  KDE/Qt doesn't allow binary distribution (9)
unless you buy a license from Trolltech...  wxWidgets suffers from
bloat and is prone to binary compatibility problems caused by changes
to the underlying toolkits, i.e. a Motif change on Solaris will render
the UI unusable.  Right now we use, develop, and host FLTK, which offers
all of these things (#5 is part of 2.0...) so that we can write our UI
code once and distribute on multiple platforms.

In short, we ended up adopting a promising project because it actually
addressed our needs as an ISV, and even today that decision is still
valid.  We don't want or need the complexity, dependencies, or size of
today's Linux GUI toolkits, and it should be noted that Microsoft and
Apple have built far more successful environments with smaller, simpler
GUI toolkits.  I'd love to see a single standard toolkit that ISVs like
us can use for Linux that has minimal external dependencies so that it
will work on all Linux distributions and even commercial UNIX's, not
just a select few you choose to support.

I am aware that I'm asking for a lot, however given that basic GUI
functionality and usage is fundamentally unchanged from 10 years ago,
I'd think we spend time on something other than making the buttons
look prettier or transparent...

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Publishing Software        http://www.easysw.com