Re: [Eiffelws-list] EWS

[Daniel F M. <dmo...@ex...>]

On Sat, September 16, 2006 12:34 pm, Raphael Mack wrote:
> Hello Daniel,

Hi,

> what do you think of EWS? I'm doing a project with an embedded system
> and think about using ews for it.

Cool! Hope you don't mind I also send this answer to the ews mailing list at
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/eiffelws-list

> So far I write directly to the framebuffer and render text using
> freetype. This works fine and is fast. I don't know yet whether I want
> to use SDL with EWS or whether I will write a second backend (shouldn't
> be that hard, I think) or stay with my own thing and implement windowing
> there. E. g. I'd also need the possibility to poll other inputdevices in
> the event loop.

It depends. If you just need some drawing, Just using SDL in a more direct
interface is enough. If you need windowing, widgets, complex event
handling, focus and that probably EWS is for you, and will save you some
time solving some tricky interaction issues. Adding other input devices is
not very hard (I've got a project where I put network messages into the
event loop, for example), more if they are already supported by SDL.

If you just need SDL, some classes in EWS (like SDL_SURFACE) are direct
SDL wrappers and can be used without depending on EWS.

EWS should not give you a large performance disadvantage (most of the time
in EWS apps is spent inside SDL, doing blitting/rendering); freetype fonts
are supported in the CVS version.

> Since my project is se2.3 based ews would have to be ported. Do you have
> any plans here?

I have not commited every change, but just changing the name of the
external methods (like SDL_UpdateRects to sdl_update_rects) solves all the
portability issues needed to run EWS on SE2.2. Let me know if something
else is needed to move to 2.3

> Do you think a 2.3 aware version should also work with
> 1.2? - e.g. on my system I do not have set SmartEiffelDirectory anymore
> and such configuration would be more complicated if we support both...

I am using EWS with some 1.2 projects (that eventually will move to 2.x,
but I have not time for hta yet), so I strongly prefer keep it compatible
with both. Let me know which configurations problems you have and I will
try to fix them, at EWS or at SE1.2

Regards,
     D.