{Spam?} [ale] (reasonably) mature GUI solutions in Linux

[John Wells]

Irv,

Euphoria looks really interesting, but is out because he needs to support
Windows as well, and in my experience Gtk on Windows is just not there yet.

Is it really a problem?  Well, I'm not sure and will have to ask him what a
accceptabe effort is.  I know he does compete in a fairly competitive
market, and is also a rising success in that market, so I suspect he'll want
to be pretty sure he can prevent any unauthorized "viewing" of code.

This may be one of those situations that, at least from a GUI standpoint, is
really best suited by (shudder) VB or something Windows-centric.  Since most
of his clients are Windows'ers, it'd be a hard sell to say otherwise.  I was
just hoping to find an open tool that would work on Windows and provide an
acceptable level of features to replace VB and Delphi (which he uses as well
on occasion).  He's also a drag-n-drop type of developer...it might take him
a bit to get used to the command-line way.  But, he's also doing some of his
programming in DOS based Wordstar...so he can't be *that* far off.

I still plan to get him going on an open backend from the database side of
things...

Thanks to all for the input!

John


-----Original Message-----
The trick used by, for example, Euphoria is to mangle variable and function 
names, reorganize the program flow, and encode strings so that it would take

a skilled programmer much longer to "decompile" the byte code and make a 
minor change than it would take the same programmer to write a new program 
which performs the same functions. 

An unskilled programmer without knowledge of how the language works would
take 
nearly forever to "decompile" and modify anything beyond "hello world".

No matter how obfuscated you make the source, there's nothing to stop
someone 
from just copying a program and using it as-is. You have to devise other
ways 
of preventing this. But is any of this really a problem - as long as you're 
not selling games, that is?

Irv





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