Interview
Why did you join this project?
It's a long story. Sometime around 2003 I was working in a cards game app that we wanted to run on multiple platforms. At the time, our choice was to code it using C++ Builder and Kylix. So, we had a thing that ran on Windows and Linux, but we wanted more portability, and C++ Builder-Kylix started to look more likely to be abandoned by Borland, so I started looking for a toolkit that was as easy to use and multiplatform. We wanted to use C++ because the app had to be very responsive, but I really didn't have great expectations into find something as good as I found wxWindows (at the time) to be. Of course, after that, the natural step was to look for an IDE that let us create the GUI quickly (again, I didn't expected to find something as easy as C++Builder's interface, and I was right about this). After some digging I found Guru's posts in some old wxWindows forum announcing an alpha WYSIWYG designer built in Delphi; I downloaded it and saw it was in the same direction of Delphi's or C++ Builder's interface, with which the project staff was very related, but of course was too early in development and was not near to be usable at all (I even keep one of the earliest versions of that app). Anyway, for diverse reasons I quit that job, but my interest in wxWindows kept growing and after something like a year of silence from Guru, I found that he had integrated he's code into DevC++, created a nice all-in package for wxWidgets development and started this wx-devcpp project on sourceforge, so I naturally felt the need to contribute with something.What contributions have you made?
Not many so far :) My first attempt to work in the project was to create an easy way for third parties to create new visual components without the need to merge them statically in the main sources and rebuild, which is an standard feature of the C++Builder - Delphi IDE. I had some problems with my results, and never actually accomplished anything during a year. Then, I realized that my code could never work as long as the wx-devcpp designer was hard coded into the rest of the code, due to circular references happening when linking the component's code at runtime. So, that, and the fact that the separation of the wx-GUI portions of the code from the vanilla DevCpp sources could bring a lot of benefits, I decided to decouple the designer and create a plug-in system to let it work as a runtime component, that at the same time gives more flexibility for creating other dynamic components. This thing is in late Alpha stage, and that's what I have so far...What features do you most want to see in wxDev-C++?
One of the most wanted features would be to make the app be multi-platform. Sadly, our best option is to make it Kylix compatible, which only gives us Windows and Linux; but it looks like it is impossible to port all the features to this environment, so I think that will remain a dream. Also, I always wanted to create a component suit like Crystal or Quick Reports for easy "visual" creation of printable reports. This guy Juergen D. Geltinger (http://www.daily.de/RepWrt/) created wx classes useful for this goal, also, Scott Fant (http://home.earthlink.net/~scottfant/ReportWriter/index.htm) updated and improved them later. Maybe some day I or someone can create wrappers for these classes for wx-devcpp. Last, it would be good to have some visual components for database development.In what areas do you think others could help?
I think it would be very nice to have a big catalogue of pluggable-dynamic components for all needs: sockets, threads, web, graphics .... a third party support like what Delphi had in its better days. If the plug-in system becomes part of this project, I hope those things could help a lot attracting more developers to this platform.