[ Thanks to Nate Case
for this link. ]
“These are exciting times for Borland. Not since the first
whisper of Delphi has there been this much excitement about a
Borland product. I’m talking, of course, about Kylix, the project
to bring C++Builder and Delphi to the Linux operating system. The
Delphi version will be available first, so for the rest of this
article, Kylix refers to Delphi for Linux.“
We’re developing a new VCL that will work with the Windows and
Linux versions of Delphi. This means you can write an application
in Windows, then move the source to a Linux box and recompile it –
or vice versa. This new VCL is named CLX, for Component Library
Cross-Platform. CLX encompasses the entire cross-platform library
distributed with Kylix. There are a few sub-categories, which, as
of this writing, break down as follows:
- BaseCLX is the RTL, up to, and including, Classes.pas.
- VisualCLX includes the user interface classes, i.e. the usual
controls. - DataCLX comprises the cross-platform database components.
- NetCLX includes the Internet stuff, e.g. Apache, etc….”
“As you can see, writing a cross-platform control isn’t all that
different from writing a VCL component. If you’re a new component
developer, it won’t be difficult to learn. If you’re an experienced
VCL component builder, most of your knowledge will transfer to
Kylix nicely.”
“As I said earlier, there are a lot of differences, but that
should only affect developers who have components that rely on the
Windows API. If you wrote a control that was a descendant of a VCL
control, an aggregate of a few controls (as I did here with
TCalculator), a non-visual component that doesn’t rely on the
Windows API, or was a TGraphic control, then you shouldn’t have
much trouble porting it to Linux.”