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Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

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Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#51

Post by Joeri »

tabtab wrote: post #4
mwexler wrote: post #2

Wikipedia provided this simple description, which would be nice to see on the RC post (but perhaps they assumed the only folks interested in an RC post would be folks familiar with the tool already): Lazarus is a free cross-platform visual integrated development environment (IDE) for rapid application development (RAD) using the Free Pascal compiler.

I miss WYSIWYG IDE's like Delphi, VB-classic, and Lazarus. Dealing with HTML "autoflow" and Bootstrap is a royal pain. You sketch a draft GUI that seems a good fit for the application and users, and then realize you have to jump through hoops backward on a unicycle while chewing gum blindfolded to get it right on web browsers. Jetsons WYSIWYG technology yanked from my happy fingers by an LSD "standard". (I'm assuming…

WYSIWYG web tools still exist, but they went SaaS. They’re called “low code development platforms”. If you want to play around with one you can download mendix’s modeler for free.

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#52

Post by tabtab »

pulse7 wrote: post #47
tabtab wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generic GUI API's that fit a wide variety of application programming languages has proven a very tricky task. I know of none that do it close to right. Data structures and object models vary too much between languages. If you "solve" this by extracting out anything potentially programming-language-specific (such as variable types and data structure "types"), you end up with something that looks like a markup language…

Eclipse is a generic IDE for multiple programming languages. And so is IntelliJ IDEA...

I think there has been a big miscommunication somewhere. I don't see what IDE's have to do with this. I'm thinking of say having a "draw button" command that works in any programming language similar to how just about any programming language can send and receive HTML to "have" a UI via a web browser. But, the markup language would be better suited to GUI's than HTML/CSS/DOM.

Note I am not against middle-ware that can translate a GUI markup language to and from "native" data structures/types. I use and make "HTML helpers" in specific application languages all the time so that I'm not communicating in raw HTML for specific common items.

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#54

Post by tabtab »

lmz wrote: post #44
tabtab wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, can Lazarus be used to build a "GUI browser"? For example, can one send a "create button" command or tag to it and have it draw one dynamically? What about new panels and forms? How "meta" can its GUI engine be at run-time.

Yes it can do that. That's how the IDE works and displays the GUI designer.

Can you recommend any documentation on the "meta" angle? Most documentation I find assumes the creation of "static" widgets that are activated or hidden at run-time (or at least act that way).

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#55

Post by nly »

tabtab wrote: post #27
dragonwriter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There really isn't a reason I can think of that I shouldn't be able to throw together a GUI in a WYSIWYG editor and maybe define some basic behavior, then give it one or more programs it should run in the background and pass messages back and forth. Or even let me just tie events to a command pipeline and dump the result into another widget, basically just letting a GUI be part of the composable toolset following t…

As I view the problem, what's lacking is a GUI markup standard roughly comparable to HTML. HTML browsers were not originally meant to build full-on GUI's in, but the industry has accepted the habit of forcing them to "do" GUI's using convoluted tricks and giant JavaScript libraries. By the way, the "GUI markup language" doesn't necessarily have to be XML-only. Maybe JSON or CSV versions can be defined also. However,…

QML has provided what you want for a decade, and it runs on Linux, macOS, Windows and Android

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#56

Post by nenadst »

tabtab wrote: post #4
mwexler wrote: post #2

Wikipedia provided this simple description, which would be nice to see on the RC post (but perhaps they assumed the only folks interested in an RC post would be folks familiar with the tool already): Lazarus is a free cross-platform visual integrated development environment (IDE) for rapid application development (RAD) using the Free Pascal compiler.

I miss WYSIWYG IDE's like Delphi, VB-classic, and Lazarus. Dealing with HTML "autoflow" and Bootstrap is a royal pain. You sketch a draft GUI that seems a good fit for the application and users, and then realize you have to jump through hoops backward on a unicycle while chewing gum blindfolded to get it right on web browsers. Jetsons WYSIWYG technology yanked from my happy fingers by an LSD "standard". (I'm assuming…

you could have a look at

https://www.tmssoftware.com/site/tmswebcore.asp or

https://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=ewb or

https://smartmobilestudio.com/

All three claim to be a form of "Delphi for the Web"

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#57

Post by pjmlp »

noir_lord wrote: post #18
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #16

I love the idea of a WYSIWYG IDE that's integrated with the language like this, or like VB used to be, but personally I just can't stomach the whole "have to learn yet another language to use it" problem. From what little I've played with Lazarus and FPC it seems really nice though, and I might make use of it for some smaller projects at work in the near future. I'm sick of trying to make web apps and all the ridicul…

Object Pascal is a nice language and it's terse (it's surface is quite small). In a lot of ways it feels like a forerunner of C# (unsurprising as the lead on Turbo Pascal/Object Pascal was Anders Hejlsberg). I loved Delphi 6, still miss it in some ways.

From the early days I thought it was a mistake for Java and .NET not to follow on what was common back then, and offer AOT compilation out of the box.

Java AOT solutions were all commercial (gcj doesn't really count) and .NET had NGEN, but it was only meant for fast startups.

.NET was specially disappointing in this regard, given that it had quite some influences from Delphi.

We had to wait around 20 years for AOT to start being part of the default toolchains.

Had it been there from the start, including proper value and unsigned types in Java, and maybe there would be much less software written in C and C++.

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#58

Post by janvidar »

axaxs wrote: post #15
tabtab wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss WYSIWYG IDE's like Delphi, VB-classic, and Lazarus. Dealing with HTML "autoflow" and Bootstrap is a royal pain. You sketch a draft GUI that seems a good fit for the application and users, and then realize you have to jump through hoops backward on a unicycle while chewing gum blindfolded to get it right on web browsers. Jetsons WYSIWYG technology yanked from my happy fingers by an LSD "standard". (I'm assuming…

I cut my teeth on VB classic, as I'm sure a lot of folks my age did. I was learning C/C++ concurrently, got through the basics, and of course hurried to GUI programming since that's what I made. It's been 20 something years, but I remember it being something like 31 lines of code to just get an empty window in Windows. With VB it was basically zero effort. I wish WYSIWYG IDEs for both desktop programming AND html (re…

I also did some VB classic and Delphi back in the day. I later moved on to C++ with Qt.

I've not been working on GUI programming much since, but I really enjoyed the Qt experience; good tools and superior documentation.

I never liked gtk - much for the same reasons as your Windows GUI C programming; Too verbose for trivial and mundane things.

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#59

Post by rcarmo »

dejv wrote: post #53

Lazarus is great, I just hope they create full support for MacOS. Curent state is more or less broken and not really usable.

I installed it a year or so back for testing, and I find it especially telling that you still have to download three independent disk images (compiler, GUI, extras).

Even sadder is the fact that instead of having a regular Mac app bundle, the installers spray things all over the filesystem. It’s defensible for the CLI tools, but hardly native.

Still, I look forward to final release - I just hope it has a better native look and feel than 1.8.

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#60

Post by rcarmo »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #16

I love the idea of a WYSIWYG IDE that's integrated with the language like this, or like VB used to be, but personally I just can't stomach the whole "have to learn yet another language to use it" problem. From what little I've played with Lazarus and FPC it seems really nice though, and I might make use of it for some smaller projects at work in the near future. I'm sick of trying to make web apps and all the ridicul…

Pascal was my first academic programming language, so “the yet another language” thing is… debatable :)
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