Re: IBM i GUI Frameworks

[Aaron Bartell <aaronbartell@xxxxxxxxx>]

FYI, we just release a new site for RPGUI that is going to be announced this
week.   It is now named OpenRPGUI and can be found at www.OpenRPGUI.com

Here are some fundamental differences:

1) powerEXT and Renaissance both make use of CGIDEV2 which has license
issues.  Not saying they aren't excellently developed, because they are from
what I have seen.

2) powerEXT is GPLv3 and requires a license more or less (unless you open
source your application which is highly unlikely - Henrik, let me know if I
am incorrect).  This means I can't use powerEXT source in OpenRPGUI.
OpenRPGUI is LGPL which is much more liberal (i.e. better for developers)
and doesn't require you to submit your changes back to the core product or
open source your application.

3) OpenRPGUI makes more use of a "display file talks to controller"
approach.  You can see what I mean by going here:
http://red.rpg-xml.com/oru11/dspf/custmaint.html.  I am not sure whether
powerEXT or Ren takes this approach, but I am finding it saves me A LOT of
coding time.

I am not for certain what license Ren is distributed under.  Maybe Kevin
Turner can respond on that note.  If it is under a liberal license there we
could make use of it in OpenRPGUI.  I am not against doing co-development,
but I doubt we could fold any of these together into one.

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/


On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 10:20 AM, David O'Driscoll <dod11@xxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> There is the RPGUI framework, the powerEXT framework, and the Renaissance
> Framework, all open source projects.  All of these are trying to achieve
> fairly much the same thing, and all of these are following a similar
> approach.  Normally competition is a good thing, but given the small size of
> each team, wouldn't it be substantially better for the i community to
> combine the efforts?
> David O'Driscoll
>
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