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Lazarus
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Lazarus is the class libraries for Free Pascal that emulate Delphi. Free Pascal is a GPL'ed compiler that runs on Linux, Win32, Win64, WinCE, OSX, OS/2, 68K and more. Free Pascal is designed to be able to understand and compile Delphi syntax, which is of course OOP. Lazarus is the part of the missing puzzle that will allow you to develop Delphi like programs in all of the above platforms. Unlike Java which strives to be a write once run anywhere, Lazarus and Free Pascal strives for write once compile anywhere. Since the exact same compiler is available on all of the above platforms it means you don't need to do any recoding to produce identical products for different platforms. Yeah, but what about the GUI? What widget set are you using? That is the neat part. You decide. Lazarus is being developed to be totally and completely API independent. Once you write your code you just link it against the API widget set of your choice. If you want to use GTK+, great! If you want it to be Gnome compliant, great! As long as the interface code for the widget set you want to use is available you can link to it. If it isn't available, well you can write it. For example. Let's say you are creating a product on Windows using the standard Windows widgets. Now you want to create a Linux version. First you decide what widget set you want to use. Let's assume you want to use gtk+. So you copy the code over to your Linux development machine, compile, and link against the gtk+ interface unit. That's it. You've now just created a Linux version of the Windows product without any additional coding. At this point in the development we are using Win32, Win64, WinCE, GTK+, GTK2, Carbon, Cocoa, fpGUI and QT as our API widget set. As soon as Lazarus reaches a 1.0 release developers will be able to start to create the interface unit to tie the LCL (Lazarus Component Libraries) to other widget sets. So is this thing really RAD like Delphi? It sure is. Is it totally completed? No not yet.The over all IDE is complete and can be used for most programming needs. Several aspects of the project are still in need of help. Hint. Hint. |
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