Saturday, March 28, 2009

What is HWGUI ?

From : http://kresin.belgorod.su/hwgdoc.html HwGUI 2.16 reference manual by Alexander S.Kresin, Sept 2006


1.1. What is HwGUI

HwGUI is an add-on library for Harbour and xHarbour, intended for creating GUI applications. There are two versions of HwGUI - Win32 version, which is based on direct calls of Win32 API, and GTK version, which uses GTK2 library and can be used under any platform where GTK is implemented ( Linux, Windows, probably MacOS ). While developing HwGUI I tried to hide from the end user - Harbour programmer technical details of API calls and to build a set of commands and functions, which could allow easily create and manage GUI objects.


1.2. History of HwGUI


I began to work on HwGUI in August 2001 and the first version was released on August 21. My initial intention was to create a small and fast GUI lib mainly for my own needs. And already in October I had wrote the first small application with HwGUI for my firm, it reads the databases, created and managed with the accounting system, generates some documents and sends them by fax.

Firstly, from the initial release and til the 1.3 HwGUI didn't use the OOP paradigm - and I even had declared this as one of HwGUI features. My main motivations was speed and stability. Harbour's implementation of classes at that time had some bugs and I didn't want to add problems to myself. And, of course, access to object's variables is more slow than access to the array items. OOP is an additional level and using of it reduces application's performance.


But later I have arrived at a decision to make HwGUI OOP based - to simplify user interface and make it better structured and more convenient. So starting from the release 2.0 HwGUI is based on OOP paradigm.

Since the autumn'2003 HwGUI is hosted by SourceForge, and there is a group of developers working on it. Thanks to all of them for participation and contributions.

Yet another important milestone in HwGUI's timeline is a December,2005 - where a development of GTK version has been started, so HwGUI became a cross-platform tool.
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In 1997, then using Delphi 3, I had already created 32-bits Windows applications for HRIS, ERP and CRM. In 2007, using Ruby on Rails, an AJAX powered CRM site running on Apache & MySQL was created and I am now using Visual Studio .Net 2008 to create web-based projects and Delphi 7 for Win32 applications using SQL2005 & DBFCDX.

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