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Re: U++ public image - please read and discuss... [message #1158 is a reply to message #1149]

Tue, 21 February 2006 17:17

hojtsy
Messages: 241
Registered: January 2006
Location: Budapest, Hungary

Experienced Member

I see these issues as the main obstacles for U++:
1) documentation coverage is the worst I have ever seen for any library
2) there is no well known big application built on it which would prove the concept (theIde is not a well known app!)
3) navigation in the topic browser is so inconvenient that even a single text file with all the docs would be better. At least a searchable panel with the class names should be provided ASAP as the first step.

4) it is perceived as a one-man project, meaning that:
4a) if something would happen to the one or two developpers the development would be discontinued
4b) some uncommon personal preferences appear which might not seem justified for the majority of developers. For example several other GUI toolkits get along quite well withouth inventing an own rich text format. Or that a hundred other text editors save only when the user requests it, but theIde knows better and saves anyway. Or the ColumnList scrolling vertically, while multi-column lists scrolls horizontally everywhere outside U++. Or that the root namespace is contaminated with 2000 global functions! This list could go on and on. I don't want to be offensive: I also have strange uncommon preferences but these should be suppressed when a library is developed for the public.

5) I feel that organization of website is unprofessional and confusing, but I can not pinpoint what exactly makes me feel this way. Altough I recently accepted to administer the updating of the website from the uppweb source, I am a developer, and not a web designer. So most probably my attempt to reorganize the site would result in something which is not any better.

I think that the strenghts of U++ are:
- very fast runtime & compile time
- feature rich
- some library services are very polished and forces a "wow": for example serialization, Nformat, xml parsing, logging, callbacks
- RAD if you already know how to use U++ (but learning is not easy enough)

I tried looking around the web for U++ related discussions. There are very few. I added a few lines to the wxWidgets wiki, mentioning some factual errors in their comparison to U++. http://www.wxwidgets.org/wiki/index.php/WxWidgets_Compared_T o_Other_Toolkits#wxWidgets_compared_to_Ultimate.2B.2B

Quote:

wxWidgets compared to Ultimate++
* Ultimate++ only supports Windows and Linux, not MacOS
* The comparision on http://upp.sourceforge.net/www$vswx$en-us.html isn't really fair. The (very old) wxWidgets sample they took is well-commented and well-structured to show the reader how to design a wxWidgets application. Their implementation is uncommented and doesn't even behave the same. Also, a small example like that doesn't show how the toolkit scales to bigger applications.

(The reference to code comments is incorrect. The 600 line wxWidget sample on U++ page contains a sum total of 4 comment lines, namely: 1 occurence of "// Constructor and destructor", and 3 of "//precompiled headers". This does not qualify as well-commented. Also the hidden hint to the U++ example being not well-structured is unfair: it just employs a more simple and straightforward structure. - Sandor Hojtsy)

Could you comment on the "behaves differently" part? It would be more fair to reproduce the functionality of the example exactly.

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