[fpc-devel]Questions about building an IDE/RAD System

[Michael.VanCanneyt at Wisa.be]

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003, Jeremy Darling wrote:

> A while back I built a form designer that looks much like the Delphi IDE.  
> The idea was to create an advanced form design system that could be used 
> easily with Delphi.  A friend of mine has been using it and suggested that I 
> port it to Free Pascal.  I don't have a problem with this, but can't figure 
> out where to start.  I would figure that the first step would be to add in a 
> code editor and a way to save/load FP files.  I downloaded the 1.90 release 
> as I figured it was the best place to look and installed it.  Now I can't 
> figure out anything past that.  Sorry but PDF doesn't work on my system so I 
> can't really read the documentation.

The documentation is available as html or as plain text as well.
You can view it even online.

Download alternate formats from
http://www.freepascal.org/docs.html
View docs online on:
http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/fpchelp.html

> Can someone post a small tutorial on 
> how to get started with FP and some notes about how the visual elements all 
> go together.  As an example my current Form Designer loads the Delphi BPL's 
> and overrides the calls that normally the IDE would use to register 
> components.

You can do the same in FP. The classes unit is Delphi compatible.

>  How or where would I do this in FP?  I'll build it first in 
> Delhi and then use it to build the same or similar project in FP so that it 
> can be compiled with FP in the frist place.

Before you embark on such a large project, I suggest you have a look at the
lazarus project:
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/

They have a fully-functional, Delphi-compatible IDE which works on Linux and
Windows. I use it daily with FPC and it works nicely.


Michael.