Hi John,

I've played around with Java a little with NetBean and I have recently downloaded IBM's eclipse, but I haven't gotten into it yet. I decided to see how the Qt compiler worked, so I went through the "Creating a Main Window Appp" located in the help manual. Qt is really very easy to build an executable.

I created a new C++ project and added a main window to it that included a menu and toolbar. I then select file --> new and select
C++ Main-File (e.g. main.cpp) which created a C program for the main even loop. After doing a File --> Save, I opened up an xterm window an navigated to the folder holding the project. The project name was lelo.pro. I built the Makefile with the following command:

qmake -o Makefile lelo.pro

Then I built the binary with the following command

make

the gcc compiler linked into the c libraries needed to build the binary. The app compiled without error. When the compiler completed, I checked the project folder and the new "lelo" file was there. I fired up the app with the following command:

./lelo

and the application came right up in a beautiful window complete with a menu and a toolbar that could be dragged an dock.

The GUI will generate the bulk of the code needed for the apps GUI from the C++ components. The IDE will also built the basic code to get the app started. A lot the behavior of the app could be achieved with the use of properties. However, I would need to get a book on C to code the object's events and any sub-routines needed to get the customized logic for the app, just like the FoxPro app need the VFP code for its business logic.

The example app also demonstrated how to set up variables which are strictly typed. It also demonstrated how to redirect closing the app to custom code that would allow for a custom shutdown of the app. All of this can be found in the "Creating a Main Windows App".

The doc on Qt seem to be good and I found a number of books on it. One of the books is just coming out within the next few months.

QT would not be a good choice for a web based app. In a windows only environment dotnet would be a good choice. For cross-platform I would use Sun's Java or Mono. I think perl, php, python, coupled with html would also be good for a web based app that would be cross-platform.

I don't think Java or dotnet would be the best choice for building a window desktop OS like QT would be. QT was designed in connection with the development of the KDE Linux Desktop. QT is a lot like Microsoft's C++, VB and VFP.

I don't know what Qt uses for a report writer. If the client was using Windows on the desktop instead of Linux, FoxPro would be the way to go. You could easily build an app to connect to Postgres, grab a cursor and have all the functionality of the cursor and report writing built right into VFP. It a pity that Microsoft is abandoning everything except dotnet. Dot Net is not here yet, but its dangerous to use Microsoft present core of development tools because dotnet threatens to make any effort devoted to using VB and VFP obsolete within the next two to five years. Things seem to really be in a mess.

I'm witting a little shopping cart app using postgres, perl, and html. PERL was originally developed as a Programming Editing and Reporting Language (eg PERL). However, perl is difficult to use to prepare a report when compared to the likes of VFP. I must grab a stream of data coming from postgres and put it into an array. Then the array must be phrased into html. Html can then be printed, but html really wasn't designed to a printer for professional looking reports. Using perl to generate a report is very awkward and time consuming within a app. I've been searching the web for some tool that would easily allow the generation of reports from a postgres backend and might interface with perl in a way the worked in a three tier app, but no luck so far. If you have any ideas, let me know.

Regards,

LelandJ