Lazarus
Announcements => Third party => Topic started by: boki 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 (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!
-
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?
-
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.
-
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)?
-
I would like to not use any additional library. Drawing rectangles and text is good enough :)
-
I forgot: here's TECGrid wiki: https://wiki.freepascal.org/TECGrid (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.
-
And Virtual String Tree can also be used as grid, that's what I mostly use (but admitted, my needs are modest)
-
Thank you, looking at your code can help :)
-
KGrid (https://wiki.freepascal.org/KControls#KGrid_control)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.
-
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
-
Thanks for kind words :)
I’m getting more and more requests recently, so maybe it can be win-win (-win) situation :)
-
@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.
-
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).
-
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 :)
-
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.
-
So is nearly impossible for FPC/Lazarus to handle this. It is good to kown, if you want to deploy closed Software.
-
So is nearly impossible for FPC/Lazarus to handle this. It is good to kown, if you want to deploy closed Software.
Yes, in practice a binary-only distribution is problematic. Both FPC and Lazarus have many targets and the component author cannot realistically build for all of them ... plus for all recent versions of FPC and LCL.
Providing sources solves the problem!
The business model must be built so that customers want to pay for it. Many vendors decided to provide a dual license. Then the open source version lures volunteer contributions which improves code quality.
-
So is nearly impossible for FPC/Lazarus to handle this. It is good to kown, if you want to deploy closed Software.
Yes, in practice a binary-only distribution is problematic.
I think that TMS and some other vendors release a binary only trial tied to a specific IDE - like official 32bit Lazarus 2.10 (which comes with FPC 3.2 for Windows). That is not good if you aim for ARM Linux (for example), but in time vendors will learn and provide more trial platforms.
-
For infos about the problems with ppu -> https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,47582.msg340981.html
This is good to know if you want to submit ppu's in the same way like Delphi for trials.
-
So is nearly impossible for FPC/Lazarus to handle this. It is good to kown, if you want to deploy closed Software.
Lazarus have many targets and the component author cannot realistically build for all of them ... plus for all recent versions of
Lazarus itself is a counter proof. Build scripts.
-
I have been using NextGrid 5 for several years (I bought a lifetime license) and I use it in a dozen of my programs.
This is a great component, much easier and "fun" than Virtual StringTree. NextGrid is very configurable, can handle thousands of rows without problems, has a very useful column editor, dragging columns and rows works without writing even one line of code, each column (and column header) have its own color and font, background and text color of each cell can be set in event handlers, it has a footer, and more...
NextGrid is really unique. I also have a VCL component package from TMS with AdvStringGrid, but I definitely prefer NextGrid.
Please share your component to the Lazarus / FPC community, even if it would be Windows only!
In the attachment there is a screenshot with the NextGrid 5