[Kde-bindings] Future and status of qtruby (on Windows ?)

Han Holl han.holl at pobox.com
Thu Sep 30 21:22:37 UTC 2004


On Thursday 30 September 2004 22:45, Richard Dale wrote:
> Maybe report any seg faults on this list, and I'll see if they can be
> fixed.
Ok, will do that. 
>
...
> > For this to happen I must convince my management, that Qt/Ruby on Windows
> > has a future: as long as it's a one man project I don't think they are
> > going to go for it.
>
> Well there are several people other than myself who are familiar with it -
> Alex Kellett was the co-author, and it was derived from the PerlQt project
> by Germain Garand and Ashley Winters. As it's part of KDE, it isn't really
> a stand alone project, and I would hope there will be a family of bindings
> based on the Smoke library.

I wasn't really suggesting that it's a one man project. But I'm afraid my 
managers would like to see a product, backed up by a company.
>
> You can already buy a commercial version of PyQt.
I know that for a lot of people Python and Ruby are interchangeable, but for 
me there is really a world of difference. Maybe it's not entirely rational, 
because feature for feature Python seems to be Ruby's equal (with better 
libraries), but somehow Ruby fits my brains better. Like preferring Bach to 
Mozart.
                                             >If there was sufficient
> demand for QtRuby I would love to be able to make a living out of it. I met
> Matthias Ettricht and Eirik Chambe-Eng at the aKademy KDE conference and
> had discussions with them and generally evangelised ruby as much as
> possible. I think they believe that dynamic languages like ruby will become
> more important in the future. Normally if you write some software with the
> Free Qt license, you can't change to a commercial version. But I'm pretty
> sure they wouldn't object.
[ cut ]
> Yes, at aKademy see above. I think the best way to reduce the risk of being
> the first to do commercial development is to hire the author (myself and/or
> Alex) as a consultant. Then we can be on site, fix any bugs as they arise
> and train people on the team. I don't think I would charge for a commercial
> license under that arrangement, although you would still need to buy
> development licenses from Trolltech, just as if you were doing C++
> development. I believe the PyQt license is cheaper than the standard C++
> one, but it doesn't allow you to do C++ development, only python.

Well, we're a very small outfit,and we couldn't possibly hire external 
consultants.
>
>
> With Qt everything you write is cross-platform, so you aren't locked in.
> And also you can develop on Linux and then deploy on Windows, which would
> make for happy programmers like ourselves.
>
Qt maybe cross-platform, but _my_ ruby generally isn't: I'm sloppy that way<g>
I am preparing a sample application (in my own time) which I'm goind to 
demonstrate to my management and Windows colleagues. Can I then show them 
that this is truly cross-platform, in other words is there a qtruby installer 
for Windows. I don't think they even have a C++ compiler. I've got the 
companion CD of the C++ GUI programming with Qt3, and there seems to be a 
Borland C++ compiler on that. Would that be sufficient to demonstrate qtruby 
on Windows ? Does it work on Windows at the moment ?

Cheers,

Han Holl



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