Development IDE for X11?

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Kirsten-Duarte · #1 Post by **Kirsten-Duarte** » Fri 16 Mar 2012, 12:10

Is there any good graphical IDE for X11 - Puppy available

Like windows knows Visual Basic for example or Visual Studio which enables you to design dialogs and stuff like that?

sunburnt · #2 Post by **sunburnt** » Mon 19 Mar 2012, 01:29

Glade for GTK+ is as close as you`ll get in Puppy ( see Glade post in Programming ).

The Gnome WM has Mono, which is .NET for Linux.

disciple · #3 Post by **disciple** » Mon 19 Mar 2012, 05:36

There are a whole bunch of them - it really depends what language you want to code in and what gui toolkit (GTK/QT/FLTK etc) you want to use. Do you know?
What are you intending to write?
I think depending on what you are using, putting the gui together without a graphical designer isn't particularly hard - the hard part is the code.

Kirsten-Duarte · #4 Post by **Kirsten-Duarte** » Wed 21 Mar 2012, 16:45

I had some projects going such as Hieroglyph, a nice text-editor for Windows, but now I want to write it for Isys/305 too, so what would you recommend?

I have found....FOX toolkit, but it doesn't make sense or install or anything, I tried installing Lazarus, which gives an error while trying to install it.

For QT... Does anyone have a link for a .pet

As for Glade.... nice tool but I see no option to compile anything?

disciple · #5 Post by **disciple** » Wed 21 Mar 2012, 22:31

So are you saying you want a graphical interface designer with code generation?
Very old versions of Glade did code generation (which is widely considered to be "bad"), but there is a recent thread here with packages reviving it. I think Sunburnt is referring to that.

What languages are your windows programs written in?

Kirsten-Duarte · #6 Post by **Kirsten-Duarte** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 00:49

Mainly Visual Basic, I am aware of Wine and stuff like that, but I think it didn't work when I tried it.

RSH · #7 Post by **RSH** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 01:34

Kirsten-Duarte wrote:... I tried installing Lazarus, which gives an error while trying to install it.

Did you try the LazY Puppy Lazarus sfs?
http://smokey01.com/RSH/LazY-Puppy-528/ ... FPC242.sfs
It has been tested and works in lucid, wary, slacko. It is recompiled because the original had a main bug.

Details:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=68589
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=73430

After loading the sfs you need to edit the lazarus.desktop file and set categories to utility. I made a special menu entry for sfs files in LazY Puppy. That's why you need to do this. Do the same on the other .desktop files to get the documentation into the menu.

Let me know, what's the result.

Edit: a few days ago i heard, it works also in 4.3.1. I did get it to run in 4.2 producer puppy, but could not test because of no devx for the producer pup. Devx is always needed.

disciple · #8 Post by **disciple** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 03:09

Kirsten-Duarte wrote:Mainly Visual Basic, I am aware of Wine and stuff like that, but I think it didn't work when I tried it.

I don't know how you would define Wine itself "not working"... presumably you mean your applications as they are now didn't work with it? You may want to check out winelib.

But if by 'visual basic' you mean VB.NET, there is a good chance they will work with Mono either out of the box or with very minor fixes. A few weeks ago I fixed the VB.NET application I maintain to run with Mono. All it required was a trivial fix to a Microsoft bug in the autogenerated code for the gui, and replacing all the bits of code that used \ as a directory separator with code that also worked on Linux (where / is the directory separator).
But I don't like .NET/Mono... too bloated and sloooooow

For any .NET program you can run the Mono Migration Analyzer to identify issues you may have porting it to Mono.

disciple · #9 Post by **disciple** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 03:24

If you want to use BASIC, but not Mono, I believe there are several Linux options which are currently maintained. But I think personally I would try MU's gtkbasic. I think it is a graphical interface designer with code generation. It is small and fast enough that programs developed with it used to be included in Puppy. I don't think anyone is maintaining it anymore, because Mark was focussing on Vala (he was writing a utility to help translate from C# and Windows forms to Vala and GTK!).

sunburnt · #10 Post by **sunburnt** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 03:34

I`ve never heard of V.B. working under Wine, it`s just too O.S. imbedded.
MU made a Puppy with Mono and an SFS file of Mono a very long time ago.

There may be a Puppy built with the Gnome WM you could install Mono to.

You may consider BaCon ( BAsic CONverter ), it`s a Basic that`s converted to C and compiled ( like V.B.!).
No graphic GUI builder, but it`s not really needed that badly, one could be written in BaCon though...
It works pretty well, the GUI commands are limited in the number of controls and the properties they have.
BaCon site:
http://www.basic-converter.org/
BaCon forum:
http://basic-converter.proboards.com/

disciple · #11 Post by **disciple** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 03:51

BTW:
- you don't need Gnome for Mono.
- in theory you can statically compile Mono apps for Linux so people without Mono installed can run them... but I encountered a bug with this (and filed a report of course).

disciple · #12 Post by **disciple** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 04:00

Sorry, I thought I mentioned it in the Glade thread, but it was actually a different thread:
If you are interested in Vala, there is a similar program to the old Glade, but for Vala instead of C: http://code.google.com/p/gladev/

Kirsten-Duarte · #13 Post by **Kirsten-Duarte** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 10:24

Assuming I'd write a application with Glade, what does it use as interpreter? Or how to even run the application? lol

I see no option to execute the program at runtime or anything?

As I want to equip my Isys/305 OS with many applications I wrote for Windows, I can redo them on Isys as well, but I need a proper development interface for it lol.

disciple · #14 Post by **disciple** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 11:18

The old version of Glade generates C code. The new version doesn't generate any code, just a libglade or gtkbuilder XML file that describes the interface. You can write code to use the XML file in all sorts of languages - bash, python, C, C++, C# (I think), perl, vala...
I haven't used the old version of glade, but I think it is only a gui builder, not a full IDE like Visual Studio. So you would typically still write the code in in an IDE like Geany or Bluefish or Codeblocks.
I think on Linux it isn't really normal for an IDE to have integrated graphical gui builders. Some programs do - I think QT creator, Monodevelop (for some languages), Codeblocks I think for wxWidgets...
But with a glade or gtkbuilder GTK interface for example, you would normally design the gui in the Glade designer, but write all the code in a separate IDE.

disciple · #15 Post by **disciple** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 11:21

Oh - I see that some IDEs can apparently integrate with the Glade designer. Try Anjuta... its pretty big though.

disciple · #16 Post by **disciple** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 12:04

FLUID is another program that does code generation. For FLTK.

===================
I've had a play around with Anjuta (note I'm not running Puppy), and ignoring the issue of what language you want to use, for GTK I'm pretty sure its everything you want. For a start it seems like it does everything for a gtkbuilder project (in C, C++, Python or Vala - I'm not sure if you can get plugins or something for other languages) that Visual Studio does for the languages and frameworks it supports.

===================
If you want a general guide to programming with Glade3, not using Anjuta, you might want to check out something like http://www.micahcarrick.com/gtk-glade-t ... art-1.html

Kirsten-Duarte · #17 Post by **Kirsten-Duarte** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 12:22

Only exit point I see for now... the key is in Links:

Write a console application and use a switch to load it in X11... or:

Use the Links WWW Browser and build a nice HTML Framework around it in the shape of HTML applications, which isnt quite effective for Text editors or anything.... but Lazarus doesn't work, GTKbasic doesn't work... everything I tried for GUI development doesn't work on Puppy.

disciple · #18 Post by **disciple** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 12:34

everything I tried for GUI development doesn't work on Puppy

Don't be silly - of course they work on Puppy. There are definitely people who've been using several of them in Puppy in recent times.
Perhaps you need to ask for help if you are having trouble with them.

disciple · #19 Post by **disciple** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 12:39

disciple wrote:If you want a general guide to programming with Glade3, not using Anjuta, you might want to check out something like http://www.micahcarrick.com/gtk-glade-t ... art-1.html

There's another one at http://blog.borovsak.si/2009/09/glade3- ... ction.html, with the example converted to vala at http://vala.posterous.com/using-gtkbuil ... ted-by-gla

EDIT - since posterous is going down soon that last link will disappear, but it is available at archive.org

2byte · #20 Post by **2byte** » Thu 22 Mar 2012, 13:12

May I stick my 2 cents worth in here?

When I first came to Linux from Windows I wanted the same thing, something like VB that was familiar. After wasting a couple of years trying gtkBasic, GTK/Glade, Gambas, Vala, C, tcl/tk, BaCon and others I can say this; If you want your GUI program to work on both Linux and Windows go with Java. Even if you only want to program for Linux I still recommend it. The others are in a constant state of flux or dropped from development and it seems like the minute you get a good start on a project something is changed in Linux that renders it unusable (the functions are deprecated by a new GTK version or the gcc or the system libraries etc.). As long as you don't use OS specific libraries (.dll, com etc.) then java apps will work in either OS and you can even specify a version of the java runtime for your app to use. There are tons of Java reference materials and tutorials available as well as an OS independent graphical library to build GUIs with (the swing framework), lots of good free 3rd party libraries, good database functionality, more IDEs than you would believe, and it's fairly easy to get a good build environment set up in Puppy. My personal hands down favorite IDE is IntelliJ, and I use the free version. It has a GUI builder, code completion, context sensitive help etc. If you want a really tiny IDE look at tIDE, it has no GUI builder but it has some impressive features. One IDE that looks really good, but isn't IMHO, is netbeans (horrible code generation). Lastly, the learning curve for java is not too bad. If you learned VB you can learn Java.

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Development IDE for X11?

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