Fwd: Re: Fwd: KDevelop press release

[Sandy Meier]

Hi!
I think Ralf forgot to forward the first draft of a announce text to this
mailinglist , so here it comes.:-) 

Ralf: nice text so far, i like it very much. Maybe we should include our
Homepage URL: www.kdevelop.org somewhere in the text and add the trademarks for
mentioned products?

---------------------------------------------------------------
KDevelop 1.0 - The KDE Development Environment


1. Introduction

1.1 The Team

The KDevelop Project, started in summer of 1998, aims to provide
developers a good, stable and useful environment that can compete with
modern graphical software development tools. Since the beginning of the
development, the team has grown from three members of the core team to
seven codewriters and a translation team where another 12-15 people
contribute their work to.

1.2 Intention

The first reason why KDevelop has been created was the fact that
although Unix systems provides the user with a good and stable
environment, including the X-Window system, it lacks a modern,
competitive solution for application development that will make users of
the dark side of power think it's time to contribute to another world. 

Whereas hard-core Unix-developers state that Emacs and vi are the
ultimate solution, the KDE provides developers a complete application
framework together with the Qt library. The fact of the commercial
availability of Qt also gets the interest of commercial development
parties. Therefore the KDevelop project wants to

a) provide a code-writing environment
b) simplify the use of standard development tools such as autoconf and
automake
c) offer a RAD tool by a graphical dialogeditor that reduces GUI design
cycles
d) give developers direct, uncomplicated access to documentation written
by the team as well as by third parties, including the KDE and Qt API


2. Overview

The KDevelop IDE offers functionality for the following parts of C/C++
application development:

a) a wizard-based projectgenerator that builds configurable frameworks
for various application types
b) a coding environment, including:
- a syntax-highlighting editor
- a classbrowser/viewer
- fileviewers
c) a documentation system for direct access to HTML-online
documentation, including 5 handbooks for KDE/Qt development and fast
search functionalities
d) a dialogeditor that fits the needs for rapid construction of user
interfaces, embedded into the development environment completely
e) works with the most needed programs automatically to edit files by
mime-type, such as KIconedit or KDbg
f) CVS support for project development
g) support for uncomplicated internationalization of projects
h) internationalized into 10 languages (application; documentation only
available in english)
i) many additional features such as autosaving, commandline-passing etc.

This enables programmers to reduce development cylcles to a minimum
while at the same time offering the flexibility to work as they like
to.  

We like to mention that although KDevelop requires KDE and Qt to work,
you can as well use it for any other C++ project; it is designed as a
C/C++ development environment in the first place. It's origin
nevertheless followed in a consequent support for rapid KDE/Qt
application design.

3. Why using KDevelop IS an effort

The question is - do I want to use KDevelop for my application design ?
Or do I really like to stick to black and white, text only ?

Every developer will ask if KDevelop can be better than Emacs, better
than MS Visual Studio, better than Borland - The fact that it provides a
complete, user friendly interface to simple application development most
often steps back. 

But the KDevelop Team does not think we have to step back behind a
long-term development of e.g. Emacs. KDevelop actually IS being
developed with beta versions of KDevelop- in our own interest, stability
was and is the main goal. You can expect KDevelop to do what you want it
to do, whenever you want to. And it will stay stable, as far as we can
consider by user reports of prior development versions. 

The features were designed during the need of them for our own
development. The programmer can expect that his environment interacts
with him intuitively and in a fast but friendly way. 

All features are well documented as well as we provide a whole set of
handbooks that will give KDE primers a seamless start from whereever
they may come- GNOME, wxWindows or Motif. 

We hope that our contribution to the free software market will make more
users and programmers realize that they have a choice.

The KDevelop Team