Re: GNUstep roadmap (was Re: [Suggestion] GNUstep-test for quality control)

[Helge Hess]

On 23.10.2003, at 04:47, tech@bishop.dhs.org wrote:
> On the last Qt vs. Cocoa flamewar on cocoa-dev, the comment was made
> that one very obvious difference between the two is that with Qt,
> there's a GUI builder, but real men don't use it.  In Cocoa, there's a
> GUI builder, and only fools don't use it.  I'm a firm believer in using
> a GUI to build a GUI, and vim for everything else...

Well, I really don't want to start a flamewar on that issue ;-)

But this is the issue of scope. IB only works in a very well defined 
environment with fixed font sizes and with an interfaces made for each 
language separately. Qt works on almost any platform (pretty well) and 
you write the interface once. Now that one-time process is harder in 
the first place, but much better for portability, maintenance and a 
bunch of other reasons in the long run.

This is pretty much like EOF - very nice for prototyping a quick hack 
which is extremely nice and impressive - but a lot of work afterwards.

And only fools don't realize that nib files are absolutely unsuitable 
for team development, especially in the highly concurrent OpenSource 
space.
Take a look at all the MacOSX apps from Apple. Few come with .nib files 
which really contain the actual UI - usually just a wrapper and all the 
interesting stuff is done in code.

> I can only speak for myself, but I would be looking a lot harder at
> renaissance for my (OSX only) app if it had something along those
> lines...

Well, your above example IMHO applies very much to Renaissance as well. 
Nobody will use a R. GUI app if it is easily possible to write the XML 
files by hand - the more readable the files are, the less important is 
the GUI builder.
For the very same reason why only real beginners write HTML or XML 
using some "GUI editor". Anyone who wants to have maintainable HTML or 
XML code, writes it by hand.

Helge
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