[sword-devel] roadmap for Windows frontend(?)

[David Trotz]

I am interested in helping out this summer, which for me starts in three
weeks. I personally think it would be nice to work on the wxWindows frontend
because it is portable, and maybe we can get more developers to help out
since the compiler and development tools are free. It seems impossible to
get much help with the Borland project, although I prefer the Borland IDE
and all the wonderful debugging tools it has, I really want to see our
Windows front-end take off. So I will go wherever you all go.
David Trotz
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Little" <chrislit@crosswire.org>
To: <sword-devel@crosswire.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2003 2:26 PM
Subject: [sword-devel] roadmap for Windows frontend(?)


> I would be interested in getting a feel for where people believe we should
> head with Windows frontend development (after 1.5.6).  I'm really only
> interested in realistic and feasible near-term objectives, especially from
> those people who are likely to actually put work into the project.  The
> reason I ask is because I would like to know where I should devote my
> time.
>
> As far as I can see, there are four roads we can take with BibleCS at the
> moment:
>
> 1. Keep doing the same as we've been doing.
>
> 2. Move to Gecko rendering with the same BibleCS codebase.
>
> 3. Develop the desktop-based prototype to match the features of the
> current BibleCS codebase (and presumably add Gecko rendering).
>
> 4. Dump BibleCS development to concentrate on the wxWindows-based
> frontend.
>
>
>
> -----
>
> My own hopes/feelings/vision....
>
> I'm somewhat torn between options 2 and 3.  I feel as if it is really time
> to move past RTF (ruling out option 1) and I feel that wxWindows, while a
> very nice way to support multiple platforms, cannot serve the
> Windows-using community as well as a Windows-specific API would (ruling
> out option 4).  (wxWindows, for example, could not manage the
> desktop-interface of the prototype very easily, to my knowledge.)
>
> Personally, I wish we could dump BibleCS and do an MFC front-end in VC++
> since that would eliminate a lot of the nonsense we put up with, having to
> essentially port 3rd party libraries from VC++ to Borland, but I don't
> think there are enough like-minded developers to support moving
> development to VC++.
>
> So I guess my vote, out of the options I listed, would be to do option 2
> for the next release (get Gecko rendering done) then use that to really
> get started on option 3: BibleCS 2.0.
>
> Some of the big advantages of finally moving to HTML rendering will be
> ability to produce interlinear texts that actually stack and to use CSS
> for user-customization.  With CSS, we could even toggle things like
> Strong's numbers or footnotes by a change to the CSS instead of running
> through our filters.
>
> Thoughts/comments?
>
> --Chris
>
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