[ZooLib-dev] Is ZooLib ready for real-world use?

[Joshua J. <ju...@nc...>]

Hello,

First of all, I apologize for the slightly inflammatory subject line 
-- I'm not here to rant about the issues I'm having with ZooLib, but 
to solve them.  So I'm just trying to get some attention.  In case I 
raised anyone's hackles, you may lower them now. :-)

I work for the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), 
part of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at NIH (National 
Institutes of Health) near DC.  My branch writes the scientific 
software.  We use a cross-platform toolkit, and my job is to maintain 
and develop the Mac support.

The version of the toolkit currently in circulation is written in C 
and uses an app framework developed in-house called Vibrant, which is 
about eleven years old and shows it.  We're developing a new toolkit 
in C++, and are considering frameworks to use.  We will not port or 
rewrite Vibrant.  We had been considering only wxWindows, but I 
suggested that we also look at ZooLib, and so my current task is to 
try out both and make a recommendation.

I was already clear that ZooLib is the winner architecturally -- 
that's why I suggested it.  But here's where the 'real-world use' 
comes in:  We need to support Unix.  On the other hand, our C++ 
toolkit won't be ready to ship for a few more years.  So, while we're 
already using wxWindows for one of our apps, it may be feasible to 
switch to ZooLib later on (even if it means having to port that app 
myself, which I would willingly do to make better software).  So the 
race is on.

In the meantime, I would *really* like to get ZooLib from CVS.  For 
one thing, it makes it easier to make diffs, and it's also easier to 
incorporate them.  I'll import the source myself if you want.

Speaking of which, I have patches (addressing compile-time issues) to 
ZRefCount.h and ZUITextEngine_Mac.cpp, but I don't have a suitable 
diff-generator handy.

Thanks for your attention to this.

Joshua Juran