Submitted by For some months now, independent developers have been working on a Qt4 port for eComStation, and it’s almost ready. Some Qt4 applications have been ported to eCS, as well. This project is funded by donations from the eCS-OS2 community and currently they have 82% of the needed sum.
I’m not a programmer but correct me if i’m wrong: qt is going to be the next java write once, run everywhere.
While I like Qt I highly disagree with that statement. Qt is a library/framework, Java is a bytecode compiled JITed language. Totally different things! After all there are Java Bindings for Qt, so how could Qt be a replacement for Java? Also Javas main field of application is servers (J2EE). To use a lowlevel language like C/C++ there would just be insane. Also thats not the target of Qt.
For good reason – all Java GUI toolkits are unacceptably slow and huge memory hogs! Somehow neither Sun, nor anybody else could resolve these two problems – so Java is stuck with J2EE type apps, or mickey mouse mobile device (phone) applications.
You are wrong.
This is not “writeonce, run everywhere”. It is more correct to view it as “write once, compile everywhere” – which makes it similar to all the other frameworks available (GTK+ (don’t forget lazarus), VCF, WinForms (through mono)).
AFAIK Java is the platform to run apps, while QT seens to be the framework/set of GUIsh tools
Yes and No. Java is more than just a virtual machine, it has a huge class library that contains from parsers, to networking to database access etc.
Same goes for Qt. Qt might have started as only a GUI toolkit, but now it contains much more, like 2D and 3D libraries, Networking, Multi-threading and database classes.
But the big difference is that Qt based apps are native apps (no virtual machine required), so tend to be faster, use less memory etc. than Java equivalents.
Use less memory correct, now about being faster it really depends on what you are doing.
I know about Qt, but don’t do programming in C/C++ language. I can say that Free Pascal (FPC) and Lazarus has already beat Qt – based on your statement (platform count supported). FPC & Lazarus’s slogan is: “Write once, compiler everywhere”. FPC is a Object Pascal compiler that supports 15+ platforms and chip architectures, and Lazarus LCL framework supports GTK1, GTK2, Qt4, Mac OS X Carbon, Windows Mobile and Embedded Linux devices. All without the need to change your code, simply recompile your existing code for the target platform. Very cool!
FPC: http://www.freepascal.org
Lazarus: http://lazarus.freepascal.org
Oh, and Object Pascal is so much easier to learn and write than C/C++, yet just as powerful and fast.
Do you really beleave what you say?
Lazarus is horrible. It is totally unstable the LCL is totally unintegrated in any os.(using a toolkit does not make it look native) A lot parts are buggy resource hungry and practiclly unusable. The IDE is not nearly on the level of QtCreator or Eclipse.
And Object Pascal is not the language everyone want.
My experience was that it is better to use a combination like C++/Python and Qt or Python and pyGTK rather than Object Pascal and the LCL.
Couldn’t agree more.
Pascal has a special place on my heart for being one of the first programming languages I used. Turbo Pascal was great as environment.
But Pascal as a mainstream language is dead. I only see it as a legacy language, and I can say most developers I know see it the same way as I.
In that case you don’t know what is happening around the place.
Object Pascal (particularly in Delphi shape) is a quite common language for development. And when it comes to lazarus, it definitely is used quite a bit. It is no more legacy than .Net.
And I won’t even bother to answer all the nonsens and FUD about Lazarus and LCL.
Sorry but I do.
Just go to online job agencies like Monster and let me know how many Delphi jobs are you finding.
How many games, web sites, high performance computing, new desktop applications and so on are being done in Delphi?
Here in Europe very few, most of the Delphi jobs I get to know about are for maintenance work.
Seeing Qt4 being ported to so many platforms (eComStation, Haiku…) is really nice! I have always had a special interest for the Free Pascal Compiler and for Lazarus, but ultimately I decided to switch to Qt4/C++ programming for doing serious work. The biggest problems I see with FPC/Lazarus are:
(1) the documentation for the many FPC/Lazarus libraries is nothing like the one provided by Qt. Sure, there is a lot of documentation around, but either it is lacking, or it is really sparse. (I have spent a lot of time trying to find a good example for the Sqlite3 unit some time ago!) Qt provides everything in one easy-to-access place (QtAssistant).
(2) I am not able to find a decent editor which allows me to write well-indented Pascal code like I can with C/C++ (I prefer to use terminal editors like Jed or VIM instead of GUIs like Lazarus, but their Pascal mode is not as good as their C/C++ mode). And the last time I checked it, the FPC text-mode IDE was not really usable under Debian/Ubuntu nor under Mac OS X (two of the systems I usually use at work).
(3) The last versions do not provide support for OpenBSD. Maybe switching to the LLVM architecture (I have heard they are investigating this) could help porting FPC to more architectures.
I’ve not seen *any* xplatform GUI FOSS framework/system that even comes close to Qt’s documentation. Its documentation really is its killer asset, which unfortunately doesn’t get enough attention, usually because discussions about Qt devolve into arguments over C++, or about Qt’s implementation of the signal/slot mechanism or the MOC, or some similar minor/irrelevant thing.
Its sad, because a lot of other projects out there could learn a thing or two by looking at how Trolltech/Nokia did/does Qt’s documentation:
http://qt.nokia.com/doc/4.6/index.html
As you said, the docs at the above link are also available to a dev locally (if they installed them) thru QtAssistant (doc view/search app), or from within QtCreator (Qt’s new IDE).
You can say anything you want… doesn’t make it true.
And if you actually believe it, then it just proves you really don’t ‘know about Qt’ at all.
Qt is on Win, Mac, X11 (Unix, Linux, BSDs), Embedded Linux, WinCE, S60/Symbian/Maemo, and of course we’ve just learned here recently about it now being on Haiku, and this article is about it on eCS.
It is cool, but Qt was there & doing that (and on more platforms) long before LCL…
How does LCL beat Qt again?
eComStation community probobly consists of two persons.
eComStation OS is no better than total amount of its community users …
EVery single version freezes my machines. This is definitely not fun.
Your brain consist of two cells probably.
Every single thought seems to freeze your brain.
Ecs community keeps well and happy – and no, we don’t need your brilliant comments nor any kind permission from you to use what we choose. Have you got it?
If so go trolling to some linux or windows topic.
You know, it’s you who has problems with it, and it doesn’t mean we don’t have fun. After your comment we have even more for now.
Oh, hello Dear eComStation user no.2! it’s an honor to read your ‘friendly’ post. Hostility on demand, uh?
Please pass this info to your other half [i.e. eComStation user no.1]:
Definition of joke:
“A joke is a short story or ironic depiction of a situation communicated with the intent of being humorous.”
Yours sincerely,
marc
Stop barking jerc, oops Marc. (friendly enough?)
Save a breath or tell something realy funny that don’t need definition or explanation attached.
btw.Have you paid for your copy of ecom/os/2?
Your joke lacked the most important ingredient: humor.
Yep, its funny how trolls always forget about that last part…
🙂
The funny thing is that you needed this explanation to understand that this was a joke, actually, so …
“Your joke lacked the most important ingredient: humor.”
… the *sense of humour* is something you don’t really have.
And last, but not least: most of you act like the defenders of holy beliefs. There’s a line between technology enthusiast and dogmatic fanatic …
If you call freedom of speech and right to judge them “a trolling”, then I call you fanatics, dogmatic idiots without elementary sense of humour.
Cheer up a bit and take a time to think sometime! eComStation is just one of the gazillions of OSs, and you’re all just another closed-minded defenders and slaves of your beliefs who doesn’t even let others to express their own thoughts.
I think it’s quite a bit bigger than that. I haven’t used eComStation, but in the nineties OS/2 really rocked! It’s just IBM’s own doing that killed it. OS/2 was a direct competitor to other IBM products – go figure. Plus IBM had no idea how to market OS/2. A big shame.
Anyway, I think it’s great that you get such dedicated people that believe so strongly in a product that they will continue development on it – long past it’s sell-by date. Same goes for the BeOS community.
Maybe it’s not the OS, maybe the problem sits between the keyboard and the chair. 😉
“Maybe it’s not the OS, maybe the problem sits between the keyboard and the chair. ;-)”
You know what? you must be right! port scanning shows that the frozen machine is actually up. Who cares about keyboard and frozen screen. It’s alive! that’s a great success. Years of engineering. Thank you, eComStation!
I’d like to congratulate the developers and other people who have made this happen. Although I now only run eCS occasionally, and that in a VM, I still have enormously fond memories of this OS, which was my main OS both at work and at home for many years. Ahhh… Visual Smalltalk for OS/2, shall I tell thee how much I love thee? 🙂
Really, it doesn’t matter whether eCS has 1, 2 or several thousand users (the latter by all accounts), the fact is that this is a highly commendable achievement by a bunch of geeks doing great geekiness. And porting QT is a great way to extend the life of an OS.
I booted up my copy of 1.2R in VMWare Fusion just now and was surprised by how much I can still do. Up to date Firefox. Up to date PHP. Up to date MySQL. I haven’t tried getting Netbeans to work on it, as I’m not sure that the latest OS/2 Java is up to the job, but there are other good editors available. Flash 10 is nearly ready, as I understand it.
Maybe instead of knocking people who are doing no one else any harm and themselves and their community a lot of good, people should maybe relax a little and enjoy fellow techies delivering great work.
Why was this news posted on page #2 of OSnews, while the Haiku one is on the front page ?
Thom, I’m gonna get you for this…
Edited 2010-01-06 03:27 UTC