Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnAd /forum/post/21653580
If there was going to be a major shift in the GUI on windows I'd definitely encourage a move to something cross-platform. Mono is definitely an option but not all bells and whistles would be supported on all platforms. Could you look into this cross platform aspect a bit more?
btw are you on the dev mailing list?
John
Sorry, this is going to be a long post, but here are my thoughts...
I can help out on some ideas, but at this moment I do not have a lot of extra time for development. I will add myself to the list, that said I will be interested in helping if I can get enough spare time (lots of other stuff going on though).
Anytime you attempt to go the cross-platform route in a desktop application (non-web based), especially on a project without a lot of developer backing or financial incentive (open source), this is going to be a big compromise because even maintaining two code bases for two operating systems is most likely not worth it.
I would say from a development standpoint, the simplest cross-platform option is to use an intermediate layer running on a server that responds to data transformation requests and outputs the GUI back as HTML. This way all the raw number value code can be produced in any language (the data read from the meter on a MAC or Windows desktop (or any desktop), and the output GUI is produced by a server responding to those numbers. Hence everyone's desktop sends data to the server, server sends the data back encapsulated inside an HTML window in the Mac or Windows GUI. This creates a single platform to create the GUI in. The web based portion of the application could be just an addition to the existing application. For people that have a Windows desktop, they can OPT to run the server-side of the application locally on their own desktop, for the others, they use the transformation method. The ability to send data transformations to a centralized location would mean multiple web responses could be written in multiple languages as well, if someone so desired to create further improvements. It would also make the open source market for add-ons very simple for people to do. Start off by making it more of a server-only application, then once you get near the final version, it can be ported to run as a desktop application to generate the HTML locally on peoples' computers to get rid of the server layer later.