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Author Topic: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus  (Read 3839 times)

boki

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Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« on: August 12, 2020, 12:26:16 pm »
Hi everybody,

I'm receiving request from users of my grid control (http://www.bergsoft.net/en-us/product/next-grid) about porting it to Lazarus.

I would like to investigate/evaluate a little bit more about this idea and will like to see if anyone here will like to have control like this? As I'm sole developer (and there is less and less time) I would like to see if this is viable option.

I would sell it as a commercial product, but I'm thinking that maybe having Patreon or GoFundMe can be better solution as then some users can get it for free.

Thanks for any input!

Blaazen

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #1 on: August 12, 2020, 01:02:11 pm »
I wrote ECGrid which is simple compared to yours. It does not hold any data itself (so it is somewhere between drawgrid and dbgrid). I read that each cell is object which is integeresting. My grid has now about 4200 lines of code. How many has yours?
Lazarus 2.3.0 (rev main-2_3-2863...) FPC 3.3.1 x86_64-linux-qt Chakra, Qt 4.8.7/5.13.2, Plasma 5.17.3
Lazarus 1.8.2 r57369 FPC 3.0.4 i386-win32-win32/win64 Wine 3.21

Try Eye-Candy Controls: https://sourceforge.net/projects/eccontrols/files/

boki

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #2 on: August 12, 2020, 01:18:34 pm »
It have much more as I shared code with other controls from suite.

But, I would like to develop the grid from scratch as I will like to use some new techniques that I learned in meanwhile.

Blaazen

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #3 on: August 12, 2020, 01:30:20 pm »
Another question: do you plan to use some graphic library or are the Lazarus graphic features enough for you(i.e. units Graphic and Themes)?
Lazarus 2.3.0 (rev main-2_3-2863...) FPC 3.3.1 x86_64-linux-qt Chakra, Qt 4.8.7/5.13.2, Plasma 5.17.3
Lazarus 1.8.2 r57369 FPC 3.0.4 i386-win32-win32/win64 Wine 3.21

Try Eye-Candy Controls: https://sourceforge.net/projects/eccontrols/files/

boki

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #4 on: August 12, 2020, 01:49:56 pm »
I would like to not use any additional library. Drawing rectangles and text is good enough :)

Blaazen

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #5 on: August 12, 2020, 02:02:43 pm »
I forgot: here's TECGrid wiki: https://wiki.freepascal.org/TECGrid. And of course, it is open source, as well as unit Grids with TStringGrid and others, so you can look how it is done.
Lazarus 2.3.0 (rev main-2_3-2863...) FPC 3.3.1 x86_64-linux-qt Chakra, Qt 4.8.7/5.13.2, Plasma 5.17.3
Lazarus 1.8.2 r57369 FPC 3.0.4 i386-win32-win32/win64 Wine 3.21

Try Eye-Candy Controls: https://sourceforge.net/projects/eccontrols/files/

marcov

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #6 on: August 12, 2020, 02:04:31 pm »
And Virtual String Tree can also be used as grid, that's what I mostly use (but admitted, my needs are modest)

boki

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #7 on: August 12, 2020, 02:26:07 pm »
Thank you, looking at your code can help :)

Zoran

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #8 on: August 12, 2020, 02:30:18 pm »
KGrid seems to be rather rich. I haven't tried it myself, though.

The original author of KControls said that, as he had moved away from Pascal, he would stop maintaining it.
Hopefully, someone will take the maintenance.

wp

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #9 on: August 12, 2020, 04:55:28 pm »
boki, don't let yourself get demotivated to create Lazarus versions of your components. I know them, in fact, I am a customer of yours and used them in several delphi projects. I think having your components as Lazarus versions would be a great addition to the "Lazarus world" even if they are a commercial product

boki

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #10 on: August 12, 2020, 06:20:49 pm »
Thanks for kind words :)

I’m getting more and more requests recently, so maybe it can be win-win (-win) situation :)

edwinyzh

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #11 on: August 13, 2020, 09:33:44 am »
@boki,

I'm your customer. I especially like NextGrid v5. It'll be great to have a Lazarus version of the grid.
One suggestion - just port it, don't wast time start over and over again like you did with v6.

af0815

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #12 on: August 13, 2020, 11:03:29 am »
If you deploy it as a comercial component, take care your way of working works (actual only source). Because in Laz/FPC you can't deploy with ppu or similar. And is your Grid able to work on the different plattforms. Eg. Linux-arm is comming more and other Linux variants (and FPC/Lazarus versions).
regards
Andreas

boki

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #13 on: August 13, 2020, 12:10:27 pm »
Thanks for all feedback.

It will be quite hard to do simple port (especially some low level stuff), but I will like to copy large portion of code that works well.

Maybe I can send e-mail to all my users and see :)

PascalDragon

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Re: Thinking about porting my Delphi grid to Lazarus
« Reply #14 on: August 13, 2020, 01:44:07 pm »
Because in Laz/FPC you can't deploy with ppu or similar.

Of course one can deploy with only the object files. There are however some restrictions:
  • must be same compiler target
  • must be same compiler version
  • user must not have modified their RTL, FCL, LCL or anything that the binary unit depends on (at least in so far that the interface checksum changes)
  • to allow code completion in Lazarus you need at least a dummy unit with the interface part (CodeTools would need to support PPU files for that)

Please note that the points 1 to 3 also apply to Delphi.

 

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