How crossplatform can jaledit be ?

[Sebastien Lelong]

Hi guys, hi Sunish,

I was wondering how crossplatform could jaledit be. This is for Jaluino, I'd need an IDE, easy to use yet powerful and configurable. Jaledit would of course be a nice choice, is part of jal family, but it's not crossplatform, and this is really something important. By crossplatform, I mean windows, linux and mac.

For linux, I could use "wine", but... well it's not crossplatform, looks ugly, and most of all, last try it just crashes.

So, is there any plan to make it crossplatform ? Does using an existing and extendable/configurable IDE sound like an option ?


PS: Jaluino group is CC'd, but please reply in jaledit group

Cheers,
Seb
--
Sébastien Lelong
http://www.sirloon.net
http://sirbot.org

[vasile surducan]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-platform

[Sebastien Lelong]

so ?

[Sunish Issac]

Only 3 options for me
1) Try getting jaledit to work with Lazarus/freePascal
2) learn Python/PIShell codeand improve the UI to something similar to Jaledit. Something similar to what firefox team did to mozilla /netscape.
3)Wait for code gear to release cross platform versions of Delphi.

One of the main issues of jaledit is that its tied to jvcl/jcl/synedit so much that a direct port is next to impossible.Option 1 becomes difficult since most of the libraries are not available for Lazarus yet.
Option 2 has a steep learning curve for me and I'm not sure of the responsiveness of python like languages .
Option 3 - no time line yet.

End of the day, I'm not sure of any answers.

Sunish

[Sebastien Lelong]

Hi Sunish,

Does migrating to Scintilla could help ? I had a look at code::blocks, based on Scintilla, writing a lexer seems to be quite easy (for syntax highlighting).

Cheers,
Seb

[Sunish Issac]

I had considered Scintialla in between, in fact I had done some coding too! But the kind of effort required was as good as a complete rewrite.

I'm not good at C++ but can provide design guidelines if at all a new IDE for jal is developed based on code blocks .


Sunish

[Sebastien Lelong]

Hi Sunish,

There's also Eclipse, Oliver Carnal wrote a plugin:

http://code.google.com/p/jal4eclipse/
http://picshell.ovh.org/demo/jal4eclipse/demo1.htm


I think it's not maintained anymore...


cheers,
Seb

[Sunish Issac]

Eclipse, is just too huge... Takes a long time to open up and has a whole set of functionality that will confuse even an expert.

Sunish

[Mike@watty]

On Dec 23 2009, 11:19 am, Sunish Issac <sunish....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Eclipse, is just too huge... Takes a long time to open up and has a whole
> set of functionality that will confuse even an expert.
>
> Sunish
>

I hate eclipse.

Unbelievably ugly & slow. Eclipse is a monster. SharpDevelop is far
nicer.

I think Python is not the way to go. Java also while cross platform is
So Slow to develop (using NetBeans Sun IDE anyway).
QT is cross platform. Is it totally open source now that Nokia have
bought Trolltech? Nokia are redoing symbian and Maemo UI with QT
(Maemo uses GTK till now I think).. Certainly QT is on many platforms.

I really like the current Jaledit. But I can't keep running XP forever
and Linux is more likely for me in future than Windows8 (as I have
used UNIX since 1985 and Linux since 1999).

[Sebastien Lelong]

Hi Mike,

I think Python is not the way to go.

Why ?
 

Java also while cross platform is
So Slow to develop (using NetBeans Sun IDE anyway).

But python is faster to develop with, don't you think ? As other dynamic languages from the same family.
 

QT is cross platform. Is it totally open source now that Nokia have
bought Trolltech? Nokia are redoing symbian and Maemo UI with QT
(Maemo uses GTK till now I think).. Certainly QT is on many platforms.

Yes, QT rocks, I developed a desktop app few years ago with it (and C++), the documentation is amazingly clear, API is so elegant... But the GUI toolkit is one thing, the language to develop with is another one. There are plenty bindings out there, for python, perl, ruby, etc... For GUI application such as IDE, I would recommend a scripting/dynamic language (like python :)), to develop faster and open contributions to more people. Language performance is not an issue here (and bindings are linked over C++ libs).

Now, that being said, I think the real issue here is it's not about a GUI toolkit being cross-platform, GTK, QT or another, because I think developing an IDE from scratch (using QT as you suggest if I understand correctly) is probably not the best thing to do right now. I do think it's way too "low level". There are IDE with a nice plugin architecture, on which you can base your work. I found http://www.codeblocks.org (C++/GTK based I think, maybe too complex), and more recently http://editra.org/. Editra is python based with wxPython cross-platform GUI toolkit and Scintilla behind the scene, has a nice and well documented plugin architecture, with online repository (easy to deploy and maintain) and is lightweight.

I did consider Editra to build an IDE for Jaluino because, very unfortunately, I can't use jaledit (not cross-platform, no plugin architecture I could use to extend jaledit feature and integrate some more jaluino specific menus & commands). I still haven't made the step, hoping things to move here :)

Cheers,
Seb

PS: I discovered Maemo 5 (linux based) from Nokia just few days ago, with N900 mobile. Amazing ! I can hardly wait to play with such a nice toy. I've seen their screencast for developers, with their WMware image running Ubuntu to develop deb packages you can deploy using USB mass storage, etc... You seem to be free to your use your phone for what you want, finally ! http://www.forum.nokia.com/document/Get_started_with_Maemo_5/v176_coreflash.swf?f_releasePlatform=2&f_launchURL=http%3A//www.forum.nokia.com/document/Get_started_with_Maemo_5/