Re: Re: [Gnumed-devel] Qt licensing issues for GNUmed

[Roberto Mello]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 05:22:39PM +1000, Tim Churches wrote:
> Roberto Mello <address@hidden> wrote:
> > 
> > There's Kylix, or Delphi for Linux. It's proprietary, but allows
> > "free"
> > applications to be developed without cost.
> 
> But that doesn't meet Karsten's very reasonable criterion that the 
> development 
> tool should be freely available, so that anyone who wants to modify GNUmed 
> can 
> without bothering the original developers.

But Kylix _is_ available at no charge for those developing "open source"
applications. It's a special license from Borland. Now for how long will
Borland allow this (say, until Kylix is very popular amongst Linux
developers?) I don't know.
 
> My only experience of a GTK application on Windows is Dia, the free, open 
> source diagramming tool. Unfortunately, it doesn't look very good under 
> Windows - non-native widgets, dialogue boxes etc, not to mention horribly 
> unstable (but that is probably Dia's fault, not GTK's). But I am told that 
> GTK is the 
> least desirable solution for Windows - and that's what 95% of potential 
> GNUmed 
> users will be using, at least initially.

Your experience is most likely with GTK 1.x, which is in the past. GTK2 is
much better is all the regards you mention above.

If you subscribe to LinuxJournal, there's an article on this month's issue
about rapid development with Glade (GTK interface builder) and Python.
 
One interesting thing about Glade is that it separates UI design from the
application code. The UI design is written in a separate XML file that is
read at run-time by libglade. It's still a text file so even if you don't
have (or don't want to use) glade, you can modify it. 

When you need to modify the UI there's no need for modifying the code.

> Our experience with a Java-based semi-open source Web GIS - both Java client 
> and Java on teh server, was one of continuous memory leaks - rapidly using up 
> 1GB of memory on teh server and then all virtual memory...the developers 
> blamed the Java Virtual Machine implementations (SUN's in both cases). We 
> gave up and bought a commercial Web-based GIS instead. Others have similar 
> stories of Java use in data-intensive applications. But a typical GP system 
> will 

Yeap.

> not handle huge amounts of data, so maybe Java is a reasonable choice for 
> such 
> settings. But has anyone every seen a Java application with a fast, 
> responsive 
> GUI?

Java seems more responsive on windows. There are some problems on Linux
(threads, linker) that make it slower than it actually is. These issues
were fixed recently (NPTL, etc.) but it'll be a while before the JVMs are
modified to use those features.

-Roberto

-- 
+----|        Roberto Mello   -    http://www.brasileiro.net/  |------+
+       Computer Science Graduate Student, Utah State University      +
+       USU Free Software & GNU/Linux Club - http://fslc.usu.edu/     +
Go see if I'm in /dev/null, will ya?