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For the past four years, I have been the Chief Software Architect for OpenLab international, the company that created the OpenLab GNU/Linux distribution. Over that period, Lazarus has long been included in the distribution, but what fewer people realize is how critical it is to the actual distribution development. Read on for some insight into how we use it."
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silentcoderwrites "For the past four years, I have been the Chief Software
Architect for OpenLab international, the company that created the OpenLab GNU/Linux distribution.
Over that period, Lazarus has long been included in the distribution,
but what fewer people realize is how critical it is to the actual
distribution development. Read on for some insight into how we use it.
The first ever Lazarus program to be written for OpenLab was the
orriginal version of OLAD (the OpenLab ADministration tool), at the
time it was a fairly simple little admin tool that could do a few basic
things like managing users or launching a cd-burning application.
It's popularity took us all by surprize, clearly our customers were
saying - we want an integrated system administration tool, a swiss army
knife for maintaining our systems. Now a very large part of our user
base is schools, where the administrators are often teachers and rarely
very technically skilled.
That defined a lot of what OLAD would become. So we looked for
inspiration at the XP control panel, at other admin tools such as
drakconf, tried to find the things that were right about them, but also
the mistakes.
OLAD has grown since those early days, and one reviewer of OpenLab 4 described it like this:
"significant value is in the addition of the OpenLab Administration
screens which does everything from add and removing users to arranging
backups. The network tools are very simple to use and even with the
Live version I had my ADSL connection setup and running in no time. " (tectonic.co.za)
The nice thing is that although it took quite some time to write it
wasn't actually all that complex, I developed two new components, one
that calls back to xlib to allow me to auto-maximize windows, and one
that acts as a read-only memo-like component that changes the text
colours based on the content (a super simple markup language is used,
and this is how we do the colorized help on the left), for the rest,
it's basicallly a tnotebook with buttons on it. The one other major
change is that instead of normal dialogs, I used tgroupboxes which are
hidden/shown on demand, integrating the entire interface into a single
window.
Now normally, coming up with a design like this would take weeks or
months for people highly trained in user interface design. Lazarus
changed that, before we began to write OLAD 4, I used it's rad abilties
to do a whole bunch of mockup's, these were tiny programs that didn't
actually have functionality but did just enough to show how the app
would work if that design was followed, these runnable mockups were
sent to key customers to vote and comment on, and from this we gleaned
a first hand knowledge of what they liked and disliked. Lazarus made
this possible because each of these mockups took less than half an hour
to code (I actually spent more time designing button labels in gimp) so
we could do a good half-dosen for people to try out, and because of
it's cross platform abilities, I could compile these mockups for
windows machines as well, to get input from people who aren't on Linux
yet.
The network tools described in the review, actually has a sepperate
orrigin, in earlier versions of OpenLab we had created a unit called
seth (simple ethernet), which has all the functionalities needed to
configure networks, on top of this came gseth, a fairly nice little
lazarus program to give a GUI for it. With OLAD4 we wanted integration,
so gseth was dropped, but by simply adding seth to my project I could
reuse my existing unit, to feed a new interface.
Appart from OLAD, we've used Lazarus to create tappytux, an educational
game - for which gamepack was developed (double-buffer and sprite
components for lazarus) , and in fact even the interface for our
installer is done in lazarus (by reusing the same components, I could
make it follow the same design as OLAD, but converted into a wizard
application).
All the code for the above, including the components, are GPL'd, and
can be checked out from the subversion repository on silentcoder.co.za (http://www.silentcoder.co.za/viewsvn).
When you work under tight deadlines, ugly code can sometimes be a
consequence and this perhaps above all is why we use Lazarus, because
Object Pascal gives you a language that is so structured that even ugly
OP is more beautiful than the most beautiful code in nearly any other
language"font>Full Story |
