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Re: General questions about Ultimate++ [message #19955 is a reply to message #19952]

Thu, 05 February 2009 09:33

cbpporter
Messages: 1427
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

Hi and welcome.

Yes, U++ is a good cross-platform toolkit. The best part for me is that it is small but powerful. It can do pretty much what I need, but does not have a huge code base like Qt for example. Sure, Qt is established and has better support, but it is also daunting in proportions and you pretty much depend on the official releases. In U++ you can dive into the code more easily (the entire library is a couple of clicks away in TheIDE and you don't need some elaborate process to recompile and deploy the library) and you can fix stuff or enhance it easily. It is also pretty modular, and you can strip out parts that are not needed if you run on system constrained by hardware.

1. Under Windows U++ will try to detect your systems theme and will do a great job (except under Vista some small animations will be missing). Under Linux, you can either link with Gtk so you get the theme from Gtk (using something like QtCurve for KDE and one that I don't remember it's name under Gnome) will allow for an uniform desktop experience, with KDE, Gnome, and U++ looking and feeling the same. Or you can compile without Gtk support and you will have a default Windows skin under Linux. This won't look that consistent, unless you set all the other themes to Redmond or something, but you will no longer have Gtk and it's libraries as dependencies.

But you can always write your own theme. Widgets are skinable one at a time and these skins will be portable under both Windows and Linux. Currently on some native skin/custom skin combination there can be a bug where skins don't look exactly pixel perfect across platforms, but the bug is rare, not really visible and probably will get fixed sometime.

There is also a very beta skin called Skulpture (it is under development under KDE too) which I should really get to work and get it out of beta stage.

2. There is pretty good support for SQL interaction. The focus is more on mapping SQL statements to C++ syntax, for more convenient and type safe queries. I find it quite convenient, but there is a little learning curve involved. Check out the documentation and maybe someone who uses SQL on a daily bases can give you a overview of exactly what these capabilities are.

3. I believe the package you are looking for is called Report.

6. If you build your U++ from SVN sources you will also get a better help system and some updated documentation files. U++ has usually one release/year and maybe some dev releases also, so often users will choose to use SVN versions to take advantage of improvements since last release. So if you will start to use U++ a lot you will probably have to check out SVN versions and recompile on each development machine. This is slightly inconvenient, but on the other hand recompiling only takes about 3 minutes on decent development machine. There are also occasional precompiled SVN versions announced on the forum.

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