The BeOSJournal.

[JimCrafton]

Hi,

I have been working on a C++ cross platform project for a while now called the Visual Component Framework (VCF), and beginning to port it to other platforms, starting with linux.
I am posting this here in the hopes that others in the BeOS community may find it interesting and consider helping out with the project.
The framework itself is similar to Java and Borland's VCL, and is extremely component oriented. In addition to the framework, there is a an IDE called the VCF Builder. It is built to support a single workspace, and multiple projects, as well as full blown support for RAD GUI building. It supports editing forms/controls/components and editing properties and events. All changes made to the form are reflected immediately in the C++ code - there is no need for a separate code gen step, like Qt's Designer, or Glade, etc. Supports multiple undo/redo, and multiple compilers/linkers. i.e. The tool is compiler agnostic - Currently I am working on support for VC6, but the base libraries compile with GCC so soon there will be support for GCC as well. Future plans include supoprt for debugging so this would be a sophisticated IDE that is unique as far as I can tell (from a price/functionality standpoint).
Currently it (the VCF Builder) is under heavy development, and is not quite ready for any sort of use, I expect to have something people can play with on Win32 sometime by the end of August/early Sept.

I think this could be an extremely useful tool for BeOS/OpenBeOS, and provide a great way to create applications not only for BeOS but for other platforms as well, especially since I am trying to design to not care what your compiler/linker toolchain is.

I currenly do not have BeOS5 ( I have BeOS4.5 and it will not load on my current machine, something about not recognizxing the Promise drivers) right now. Any help would be appreciated and I would be happy to explain things to folks to get them started.
I expect the BeOS port to be the simples of all, since the is a fair amount of similarity between the VCF and BeOS API's and because both are in C++ and OOP.

For those interested, more information can be gleaned here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vcf
http://vcf.sourceforge.net/
and some docs here:
http://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=6796
and
http://vcf.sourceforge.net/docs/

Thanks

Jim Crafton
_________________
Why not try the VCF?

[DaaT]

Hello Jim,
First of all, thanks for posting here and for considering BeOS as a possible port. When we get the frontpage working again (as you might have noticed there are no news ATM), i'll post the news about VCF. Hopefully (and quite surely) that will bring more attention to your request.
I'm not a coder but it definitely looks like an interesting project.

Good luck with everything
DaaT
_________________
"Windows 95 is a 32-bit shell for a 16-bit extension to an 8-bit operating system designed for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition."

[JimCrafton]

Thanks, by the way, love your signature !
_________________
Why not try the VCF?

[DaaT]

hehehe, thanks

Not an original though, but love it

DaaT
_________________
"Windows 95 is a 32-bit shell for a 16-bit extension to an 8-bit operating system designed for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition."

[philippe]

[JimCrafton]

[moooooooo]

Jim,
this would be really nice to have on BeOS. I appreciate you taking the time to let us know.
Make sure you get the IDE Replacement driver from BeBits mentioned previously and you should be able to find BeOS Personal Edition on BeBits as well.

The trick to get the Promise controller working is to attach the hard disk to a "normal" IDE controller and install this driver, and then re-attach the hard disk back on to the Promise controller.

It should be fine after that.
cheers
peter

[memson]

Having done something similar (and you will need to at least partially wrap to controls or use a multiple inheritence bodge to add commonality to multiple BControl descendents) I can say that it's not as easy as you think it will. Unless you have a heavily multithreaded model (like BeOS) you will suffer a lot when it comes to getting you essentially single threaded world to play nicely with BeOS. Stuff like locking loopers and such will be the bain of your life!!!

Take a look at http://sf.net/projects/befpc to see what I mean. It was an attempt to present a flattened simple interface to the BeAPI to use with languages such as Pascal (which cannot link to C++ classes)... It is on hiatus at the moment, and has been for a while, but feel free to take a look/borrow ideas. There is definetely some questionable code in there.. so be warned.

[JimCrafton]

Well I have been looking at the API again, and as far as I can tell the main problem is that most toolits/frameworks expose the whole message/event loop mechanism at a very low level, and attempt to mirror on a function for function mapping for the event looping.

In the VCF things are a bit different, you simply call the UIToolkit's runEventLoop() or runModalEventLoopFor(control) - you don't deal with the platform event specifics at all.
The advantage this gives you is that the runEventLoop() call is actually optional ! So if you already have an event loop running (at least in Win32, and I would imagine X as well, not sure about BeOS), the VCF can seamlessly plugin, allowing integration into existing code like MFC or strainght Win32 programming, that is not possible with other frameworks - Fox, Qt, wxWindows, et al, are all or nothing, you use the library as a whole or none of it.
If there are disadvantages to this I have not run into them so far

So, hopefully this should be able to extend to the BeOS API as well, since the details of event loop will be hidden inside the toolkit implentation. It would mean that certain parts probably will need to made thread safe, but I don't see this as being too horribly difficult, as the framework has Mutex and Semaphore classes to deal with this.
_________________
Why not try the VCF?