[ale] UNIX equivalent of Windows DLL

[Stephan Cerruti]

> Vernard Martin <vernard at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
>
> The linux community already has a very similar toom called XForms.
> XForms is a GUI library that comes with a Visual editor for
> building GUIs. I use it often to build software and there are
> tons of software packages out there in the linux world that use it.
> Check out XFMail or xfpovray just to ame 2 off the top of my head.

Although I haven't seen these packages, it's my understanding that
most of the things that you can drag onto a form with XForms have to
do with widgets.  (i.e.  text labels, edit boxes, scroll bars,
buttons, list boxes, etc.)

In addition to these kinds of controls Borland's VCL has controls for
database access.  For example, a database grid, where you supply some
basic info, like what driver to use, the names of the database and a
table in the database, and the grid component populates the grid with
data from the table, even during the design phase before the app is
compiled.  Drop a database navigation component on the form and you
can browse the contents of a table without writing a line of code.

There are components for creating CORBA code, creating printable
reports, FTP transfer, HTML parsing, and many more.  These components
can be written using Delphi and/or C++ Builder and there are numerous
3rd party controls available.  We needed to write directly to Excel
files and found a control on the market to do just that.  Now,
depending on what a 3rd party control does, it may or may not compile
with a Linux based IDE.  I would suspect that you would have to have
the source for a control to even be able to port it.

The point is that these tools take the visual design idea to a higher
level than XForms does today.  Borland's model is a very good
component design that allows developers to concentrate on business
rules and logic instead of low-level API's that is extensible by the
user.  A VCL component can do just about anything, and a well written
component can really save time.

I hope I don't sound too much like an add, but these tools are that
good.  I can't wait to see Linux versions.