Free(real Free) GUI toolkits

[David Ross]

Has anyone tried using the WideStudio libraries with
Ruby? They seem to be neat and clean on the unix
operating systems. Anyone tried it with Windows or
MacOSX? I need some input please. It is a MIT licensed
and completely free toolkit, compared to LGPL. It has
a IDE which is very easy to design with. It has
extensions for many languages.

English page: http://www.widestudio.org/EE/index.html
Japanese page: http://www.widestudio.org

Please give some input on it.

Supports C/C++, Perl, Python, Ruby programing
language.

--David Ross



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[Hal Fulton]

Has anyone tried using the WideStudio libraries with
Ruby? They seem to be neat and clean on the unix
operating systems. Anyone tried it with Windows or
MacOSX? I need some input please. It is a MIT licensed
and completely free toolkit, compared to LGPL. It has
a IDE which is very easy to design with. It has
extensions for many languages.

English page: http://www.widestudio.org/EE/index.html
Japanese page: http://www.widestudio.org

Please give some input on it.

Supports C/C++, Perl, Python, Ruby programing
language.

I haven't tried this (or even heard of it before), but it does sound
interesting.

Some questions I would have:

1. It mentions it supports Ruby -- I guess the app designer can generate
Ruby code -- but I've never heard of a Ruby binding for it. What's the
deal there?

2. I wonder if it supports MDI. I know the whole industry is trending
away from MDI, but I adamantly maintain that it makes sense in some
cases. (Large number of tiny documents as opposed to a small number
of large docs.)



Hal

 

[David Ross]

I haven't tried this (or even heard of it before),

but it does sound
interesting.

It was a project started in 2000. It died in 2002, the
author revived it. I hope people to contribute code. I
will create X widgets myself for commercial purposes,
and submit them. Just because it isnt LGPL or
GPL(restrictive licenses).

Some questions I would have:

1. It mentions it supports Ruby -- I guess the app
designer can generate
Ruby code -- but I've never heard of a Ruby binding
for it. What's the
deal there?

You open wsbuilder, go in to options, then click etc.
then change the language to ruby. then you click
generate code.

here is a small piece of the code generated.
@newdial_006 =
Mpfc::WSCdialog.new(@newbase_005,"newdial_006")
@newdial_006.init
@newdial_006.setProperty("name","newdial_006")
@newdial_006.setProperty("titleString","title5")
@newdial_006.setProperty("x",10)
@newdial_006.setProperty("y",10)
@newdial_006.setProperty("width",200)
@newdial_006.setProperty("height",50)

@newwin000.setVisible(1)

what would be better here is..
Mpfc::WSCdialog.new(@newbase_005,"newdial_006",name,title,x,y,w,h)

maybe it has it, I might just not be looking. I am
fairly new to this GUI toolkit myself. I thought I
should share this MIT licensed kit with the people of
ruby.

I realize this looks a bit messy, someone could help
the developer improve on his code, unless I am just
missing something.

Yes, it does have different look and feels that are
"pretty". I would like to see this free(MIT) toolkit
improve to a better look and feel to the guis and
widgets.

No, it does not have MDI. I think I will promote the
WideStudio and convince people that it can be a good
widely used future toolkit. It still lacks many common
widgets. That doesn't bother me since I know X
programming well though . I do see a bright future
in this toolkit if it remains free. I would definitely
like to see it used in commercial applications, Widget
creation is not very difficult, it just takes a bit of
X programming with the C language.

--David Ross



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[David Ross]

One thing I forgot to mention. It supports..

Supports UNICODE(UTF8) and multi encoding function
with various kind of encodeing like
EUC-JP,SJIS,EUC-KR,EUC-CN,UTF8,ISO8859-X.

Supports OpenGL and database(PostgreSQL/MySQL/ODBC).

--David Ross

Has anyone tried using the WideStudio libraries with
Ruby? They seem to be neat and clean on the unix
operating systems. Anyone tried it with Windows or
MacOSX? I need some input please. It is a MIT
licensed
and completely free toolkit, compared to LGPL. It
has
a IDE which is very easy to design with. It has
extensions for many languages.

English page:
http://www.widestudio.org/EE/index.html
Japanese page: http://www.widestudio.org

Please give some input on it.

Supports C/C++, Perl, Python, Ruby programing
language.

--David Ross



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[Lothar Scholz]

Hello David,
DR> It was a project started in 2000. It died in 2002, the
DR> author revived it. I hope people to contribute code. I
DR> will create X widgets myself for commercial purposes,
DR> and submit them. Just because it isnt LGPL or
DR> GPL(restrictive licenses).

I hate myself for asking this question:
But what is so wrong with the LGPL in an object oriented GUI toolkit
where you can create commercial X widgets without any problems for any
purpose. I'm speaking about GTK/FOX/FLTK/TK here.

DR> No, it does not have MDI. I think I will promote the
DR> WideStudio and convince people that it can be a good
DR> widely used future toolkit. It still lacks many common
DR> widgets. That doesn't bother me since I know X
DR> programming well though . I do see a bright future
DR> in this toolkit if it remains free. I would definitely
DR> like to see it used in commercial applications, Widget
DR> creation is not very difficult, it just takes a bit of
DR> X programming with the C language.

I believe that the world really don't need another toolkit, with a lot
of common widgets still missing. Widget creation is also not very
difficult in any toolkit (TK may be an exception).

 

[David Ross]

I hate myself for asking this question:

But what is so wrong with the LGPL in an object
oriented GUI toolkit
where you can create commercial X widgets without
any problems for any
purpose. I'm speaking about GTK/FOX/FLTK/TK here.

LGPL has strings, if you don't believe me, reread the
license. Look at the clauses about distributing
non-source binary applications. Then take a really
good look at the clauses in wx and FOX (LGPL and the
wx license) about binary objects(*note: binary objects
are *NOT* binary executables). Thank you for your
input.

I believe that the world really don't need another
toolkit, with a lot
of common widgets still missing. Widget creation is
also not very
difficult in any toolkit (TK may be an exception).

This toolkit is more flexible than FOX or
wxWidgets(wxWindows) will ever be. WS was designed for
embedded systems, I am glad that the design works on
nix and windows.

I am glad to use WS now, it has proved more worthy
than FOX,GTK, and Wx. Big deal it lacks the more
common widgets you would find in GTK, or even Qt.
Hopefully, people will support this better toolkit.
You might not find it interesting because most people
do not read about embedded devices and read about
software like T-Engine. Please research this on your
own. the research for WS has been extensive. Its not
just *another* toolkit. Hmm okay, you must not be into
widget design that much, or do not create complex
widgets. I don't know about you, but WS is a very good
IDE. --David Ross



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[David Ross]

Oh a correction, by binary, I meant statically linked
and binary.

LGPL has strings, if you don't believe me, reread
the
license. Look at the clauses about distributing
non-source binary applications. Then take a really
good look at the clauses in wx and FOX (LGPL and the
wx license) about binary objects(*note: binary
objects
are *NOT* binary executables). Thank you for your
input.


This toolkit is more flexible than FOX or
wxWidgets(wxWindows) will ever be. WS was designed
for
embedded systems, I am glad that the design works on
nix and windows.

I am glad to use WS now, it has proved more worthy
than FOX,GTK, and Wx. Big deal it lacks the more
common widgets you would find in GTK, or even Qt.
Hopefully, people will support this better toolkit.
You might not find it interesting because most
people
do not read about embedded devices and read about
software like T-Engine. Please research this on your
own. the research for WS has been extensive. Its not
just *another* toolkit. Hmm okay, you must not be
into
widget design that much, or do not create complex
widgets. I don't know about you, but WS is a very
good
IDE. --David Ross



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[David Ross]

Hmm.. does anyone have a MacOSX computer they can try
out WideStudio on? I am curious to see if it is
portable to the mac.

WideStudio has plenty of widgets btw. I just didn't
play enough with the wsbuilder.

I guess things like MDI forms are not important

--David Ross


-------------------------------------------
drossruby at yahoo (dot} com

Ruby Production Archive(RPA - the ruby package
manager)
http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/




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[Rando Christensen]

Hmm.. does anyone have a MacOSX computer they can try
out WideStudio on? I am curious to see if it is
portable to the mac.

WideStudio has plenty of widgets btw. I just didn't
play enough with the wsbuilder.

I guess things like MDI forms are not important

Seems like it works pretty well. As a warning, it runs under apple's
X11. You might have to have people download it, as most people don't
install it by default. It's something like a 60meg download from apple's
site.

 

[Lothar Scholz]

Hello David,

DR> Hmm.. does anyone have a MacOSX computer they can try
DR> out WideStudio on? I am curious to see if it is
DR> portable to the mac.

DR> WideStudio has plenty of widgets btw. I just didn't
DR> play enough with the wsbuilder.

Okay i downloaded the 100 MB Win Installer and played a bit with
wsbuilder. I must say that this toolkit can win the second price in
the most ugly toolkit competition (the first is for the all time
winner FLTK). And there is no theming to change this, looking at the
code shows me that there will be no theming for a very long time
because the drawing code is deeply buried in the source files.

I'm sure that the toolkit is more flexible, just because it uses a
TK like approach of managing/accessing attributes by string names. Maybe
not bad but quite different. The event procedures that simple
functions. So writting C++ code would require extra overhead, but it
is okay for different language bindings.

The documentation seems not be on the state of a 3.1 release. It
describes methods but not which properties are available. There seems
to be also no real tutorial for starters. I must say that i don't
like FAQ like tutorials, that have a lot of "How to " titles but no
integrated 10 min learn the basics code.

From the technical point i don't like that the lib has no layout
mangement (only Delphi like anchors), a very bad option for everybody
who wants to do L10N. The implemented widgets are very very basic.
As a toolkit written in Japan there are of course unicode/MBCS (?)
handling routines. From the widget design it seems to be much much
harder to write or adapt widgets as it is in FOX/QT. I just looked at
the "WSClist.cpp" source code to find a place where i can overwrite
the item draw method to use my own custom draw hook. It's not
possible. But looking at the source code, hey man that code is ugly and
completely comment free. Other things, radio+check buttons must always
be grouped, so there seems to be also no good separation for
layout/logic in the toolkit.

So i think it is good that this is a dead project. Don't waste your
time to try to work with this toolkit. After working about 8 years
with writting GUI's i can tell you that the afford you need to bring
this upto date (compared to GTK/QT/FOX) is too expensive and i really
doubt that you will find so much programmers helping you.

Oh yes i forgot, the WxBuilder - the GUI builder - is nothing where
anybody want's to write larger dialogs.

 

[David Ross]

Yes, I seen that it needed X11 from the build files.
Maybe someone could port it to use a native toolkit if
it really irritates them. --David Ross

Seems like it works pretty well. As a warning, it
runs under apple's
X11. You might have to have people download it, as
most people don't
install it by default. It's something like a 60meg
download from apple's
site.

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[James Britt]

David Ross wrote:

Please give some input on it.

I thought I'd give it a try on Win2K.

It took a bit of time to figure out how to construct a basic
window/form. I still don't see how to attach code to controls.

Help does not work correctly. It attempts to load this URL

http://%1 "file://E:/Program%20Files/WideStudio/ws/doc/C/builder-doc/builder.html"

It loads if I remove the section just before "E:/"

It would be nice if each page in the set of help Web pages had a "next"
and "previous" link, as right now one has to go back to the table of
contents to move to find the link to move to the next section.

So far, don't find it all too intuitive. Little things seem awkward.
For example, when I click on the 'Save' icon, I get a message box
telling me some things have changed, and do I want to save them? Well,
yes. That's why I clicked the 'Save' icon.

And WS Builder doesn't respond to Alt-F4.

James

 

[David Ross]

"Truth is important, knock down the trolls on thier
ass
Only good people deserve respect"

You know. you are the biggest troll I have ever seen
on the mailing list. Really, stop. I'm not kidding. It
has all you need. Its free as well, no strings
attached. I don't know what the hell your problem is,
but stop. Below is my sample app I constructed in 15
minutes after learning the interface. it is simple to
create than others. It is very flexible as well. text
looks great widgets work great, and it looks the same
way on windows. I tried it, works fine. THanks now
stfu lothar_troll.

http://www.deviantart.com/view/9394050/

You didn't even research why WideStudio was created.

Okay i downloaded the 100 MB Win Installer and
played a bit with
wsbuilder. I must say that this toolkit can win the
second price in
the most ugly toolkit competition (the first is for
the all time
winner FLTK). And there is no theming to change
this, looking at the
code shows me that there will be no theming for a
very long time
because the drawing code is deeply buried in the
source files.

Send patches

I'm sure that the toolkit is more flexible, just
because it uses a
TK like approach of managing/accessing attributes by
string names. Maybe
not bad but quite different. The event procedures
that simple
functions. So writting C++ code would require extra
overhead, but it
is okay for different language bindings.

Send patches.

The documentation seems not be on the state of a 3.1
release. It
describes methods but not which properties are
available. There seems
to be also no real tutorial for starters. I must
say that i don't
like FAQ like tutorials, that have a lot of "How to
" titles but no
integrated 10 min learn the basics code.

Send patches

From the technical point i don't like that the lib
has no layout
mangement (only Delphi like anchors), a very bad
option for everybody
who wants to do L10N. The implemented widgets are
very very basic.
As a toolkit written in Japan there are of course
unicode/MBCS (?)
handling routines. From the widget design it seems
to be much much
harder to write or adapt widgets as it is in FOX/QT.
I just looked at
the "WSClist.cpp" source code to find a place where
i can overwrite
the item draw method to use my own custom draw hook.
It's not
possible. But looking at the source code, hey man
that code is ugly and
completely comment free. Other things, radio+check
buttons must always
be grouped, so there seems to be also no good
separation for
layout/logic in the toolkit.

send patches or shut up.

So i think it is good that this is a dead project.

You are trolling. Stop

Don't waste your
time to try to work with this toolkit. After working
about 8 years
with writting GUI's i can tell you that the afford
you need to bring
this upto date (compared to GTK/QT/FOX) is too
expensive and i really
doubt that you will find so much programmers helping
you.

not really.

Oh yes i forgot, the WxBuilder - the GUI builder -
is nothing where
anybody want's to write larger dialogs.

umm works fine for large guis.


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Truth is important, knock down the trolls on thier ass
Only good people deserve respect
David Ross
(e-mail address removed)





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[Michael Neumann]

http://www.deviantart.com/view/9394050/

Looks really nice to me. Could you post somewhere the code? Only code
tells the truth... ;-)

Regards,

Michael

 

[David Ross]

I thought I'd give it a try on Win2K.

It took a bit of time to figure out how to construct
a basic
window/form. I still don't see how to attach code
to controls.

mmmm. I have seen it somewhere. Oh right... its in the
procedures. you have to create procedures, then double
click on them, it will open your favorite editor, I
think you can set the editor in options.

Help does not work correctly. It attempts to load
this URL

Its main aim was unix oriented systems and the
T-Engine. I guess patches could be made, is this on
all the help or just that one?

It would be nice if each page in the set of help Web
pages had a "next"
and "previous" link, as right now one has to go back
to the table of
contents to move to find the link to move to the
next section.

the documentation is *HUGE*. There should be.. would
be nice. I think that there are no comments in the
code specifically because they stripped comments out.
If the comments were in per say UTF8(which I guess
they have thier own parser) the sources would be
double the size.

So far, don't find it all too intuitive. Little
things seem awkward.

Yes, I do too, I have even found bugs that I will end
up writing patches for. There is something strange
with the WSNdata in the tree and list controls in the
wsbuilder gui.

For example, when I click on the 'Save' icon, I
get a message box
telling me some things have changed, and do I want
to save them? Well,
yes. That's why I clicked the 'Save' icon.

I know, I laughed at this. It saves on exit asking
you the same question, and saves when you click
compile. I should patch the gui all to hell, I found a
memory leak in 1 widget in the ObjectViewer that lets
you drag and drop widgets so you don't have to learn
the names.. if you would. try creating a progress bar
from the objectViewer, It could be a library problem
on my system, unsure.

And WS Builder doesn't respond to Alt-F4.

was not aimed to be on windows. Maybe I could take a
look at this "horrible" code (/me laughs) lothar_troll
is talking about later. I did look at the code too, I
did see no problem with that type of style, names were
defined very well where I could look and tell what it
was, but then again, I know how to code well.

--David

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[Mikael Brockman]

"Truth is important, knock down the trolls on thier
ass
Only good people deserve respect"

You know. you are the biggest troll I have ever seen
on the mailing list. Really, stop. I'm not kidding. It
has all you need. Its free as well, no strings
attached. I don't know what the hell your problem is,
but stop. Below is my sample app I constructed in 15
minutes after learning the interface. it is simple to
create than others. It is very flexible as well. text
looks great widgets work great, and it looks the same
way on windows. I tried it, works fine. THanks now
stfu lothar_troll.

For what it's worth, I appreciated his review. I don't think I'm ever
going near this toolkit. It would be interesting to see you actually
answer any of his issues instead of just mindlessly spamming "SEND
PATCHES TROLL."

mikael

 

[Lothar Scholz]

Hello David,

DR> You know. you are the biggest troll I have ever seen
DR> on the mailing list. Really, stop. I'm not kidding. It
DR> has all you need. Its free as well, no strings

Maybe it has what you need to build some sample applications,
but as you write on your own a few important advanced widgets
(and features) are missing.

DR> attached. I don't know what the hell your problem is,
DR> but stop. Below is my sample app I constructed in 15
DR> minutes after learning the interface. it is simple to
DR> create than others. It is very flexible as well. text
DR> looks great widgets work great, and it looks the same
DR> way on windows. I tried it, works fine. THanks now
DR> stfu lothar_troll.

Okay 4 things that are quite bad when you try WS Builder.

- Tab Focus Movement in Widgets do not work
- Moving the selected item in the tree/list widgets outside the
window with the cursor keys do not scroll the window.
- The typical far eastern style with "File (F)" menus looks
ugly in western countries.
- Key Handling in Menus does not working.

Because i think WS Builder might be the biggest software build with
this toolkit (The website has not one reference to a real world
application) it can be seen as a reference. I know this are minor
things but there is an old rule in the industry: The first 90% of a
program takes 10% of the time and the last 10% takes 90% of the time.

And by the way, a Windows App look different then your
Linux App.

DR> You didn't even research why WideStudio was created.

Where can i find this ? Maybe you can tell me here why it was
created ?

And does history really matter when someone
picks it up to write a ruby application ?
I doubt. People pick up tools that help them to do there tasks,
not to increase the amout of work they already must do.

DR> Send patches

(Repeated 5 times)

Nice, this shows that you now that a lot of things must be done.
I don't doubt that with a lot of energy you can turn this into a
really good toolkit. But you can say this to any other toolkit as
well. So where is your point why WSStudio is so much better ?
Can you point out something else then the license ?

Maybe you can give me some more information why this thing should be
better for embedded systems ? Is there a version working on the Linux
framebuffer or a version for WinCE or handheld's ?

DR> Send patches

I don't need to send you, because here i must only look at the website
to see that they are available and only the delivered HTML files are
wrongly packed as noted before by James Britt. Seems that you never
read my posting exactly.

DR> You are trolling. Stop

Sometimes you just should look why things are going that way.
What has this to do with trolling ?
Can you please tell me why the project died in 2002 and why
nobody knows about this project if it is so good.

DR> umm works fine for large guis.

Which one ? A GUI Builder that relies on hierarchical structure of
widgets and doesn't allow you to move items around in this
hierarchy in an easy way (I speak of the Inspector Tree widget here),
that don't have tools (grid lines/alignment etc.) helping you to do
better layout ? I must not look at it very long to see that i wouldn't
use it with pleasure to do the work.

Okay it's up to you. It's your time that you have to spend on it.
I should learn to not respond to postings like yours or the one who
wants to build a rubycc. They all show the same problem: a lot of
people can't estimate the time a programming task takes. And so a lot
of energy is wasted that could be used much better in other projects.
In the rubycc case i said the persons should work together with matz
on the ruby core, i your case i would suggest to help improve FOX, GTK
or the new drawing engine in TK.

 

[Rando Christensen]

Send patches
Send patches.
Send patches
send patches or shut up.

Please don't do this. Just because a project is open-source does not
mean people have to try to fix it themselves before complaining about
how broken it is.

 

[Lothar Scholz]

Hello David,

DR> You know. you are the biggest troll I have ever seen
DR> on the mailing list. Really, stop. I'm not kidding. It
DR> has all you need. Its free as well, no strings
DR> attached. I don't know what the hell your problem is,
DR> but stop.

You can see me as confused as you are.

Has anyone tried using the WideStudio libraries with
Ruby? They seem to be neat and clean on the unix ...
Please give some input on it.

So tried to give some input. I spend about 30 min - okay it's
Sunday, so it was a little bit easier to find the time. But
after posting my oppinion you started with this stupid "trolling"
arguments ?

Maybe it is because:

hope people to contribute code. I
will create X widgets myself for commercial purposes,
and submit them.

and you only wanted to place a marketing message ?
Sorry for this but then you should have written your first message
with other words and not asking for "input on it".

 

[David Ross]

lothar_troll was complaining, not me. I always fix
things on my own and submit. This is one of the
reasons I like the BSD license, I can submit only the
changes I want. Which when I have a piece of code that
is a bad hack that I do not want to submit, I don't
have to. --David Ross

Please don't do this. Just because a project is
open-source does not
mean people have to try to fix it themselves before
complaining about
how broken it is.

-----------------------------------------
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