Oberon-2 is an object orientated programming language, a successor of Pascal, designed by the famous Niklaus Wirth. It unites the famous and proofen design of Pascal (strict type system, easy to read code, easy to follow program flow, possibility to naturally structure your source code) with the modularity of Modula-2 and enhances both of them with clean, simple but powerfull object orientated concepts, including inheritance, dynamic type information, virtual methods, various access rules on class and module basis and a build in garbage collector.
VisualOberon uses ooc and its first implementation oo2c as development tool, but VisualOberon in its design is not limited to that compiler. It fully bases on the language defined by the official language report and thus should be easyly adaptable to other compilers.
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| Simplicity. VO should give great layouting power to the programmer on the one hand, but also should take away any need to handle low-level GUI things on the other hand. It should also take away any low-level design decisions. In that way it is similar to TeX. You give it a abstract description and it will make it good looking by its own. |
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| Extensibility and fexibility. The classes should be designed to make them easily extensible. Features missing should be easy to integrate without the need to rewrite huge code sections and without breaking compability. |
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| Portability. The class library should be portable in that way that the classes share the same interface among different platforms. Programs building an interface under one operating system should be portable without any changes to the code. The class library itself is not portable in that way that it is implemented by making access to a special OS. VO must be adapted to each OS. However, VO tries to build a abstraction layer everywhere where its is possible to hide OS-dependent details. |
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| VO should give the programmer access to all common GUI features like auto font adapting, resizability, and things like drag and drop... It should be possible to build a complete state of the art GUI. |
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| The used bazzar style of developing offers quick updates and bugfixes, fast response to problems and good communication and code exchange between developers and users. |
Thus VisualOberon definitely needs the active support of more people. This should of course mainly be programmers but also designer and people with knowledge about various systems and concepts are needed. We also need more demo programs and people using VisualOberon in real world by writing programs. People writing documentation are also welcome. And at the end, support for hardware in form of mirrors and ftp access for the developers are a good thing to have :-)
You ask what you can get back for your investement in supporting VisualOberon? First you can learn much about the design and the implementation of a huge project. You learn much about the design of a GUI system from ground of. VisualOberon and it full published source code lets you look behind the scences of a modern, object orientated GUI. You learn much about cooperating and programming in a team.
There are also direct advantages for your own programs. VisualOberon due to its powerfull design, offers you an excellent plattform for rapid protoyping, quick and safe depevelopment of even larger applications. It multiplies the power and simplicity of the object orientated programming language Oberon-2, the famous succesor of languages like Pascal, with its own powerfull design, object-orientated design and its flexibility, and offers you the tool you have waited for since years. The use of a portable designed core interface to the underlying operating system, garantees that your applications will run under a variity of systems. The build in possibility to fundamentally change and feel also garantee that your applications will also adapt to the look and feel of the used system.
There is a mailinglist for people interested in VisualOberon:
It's address is VisualOberon@edge.ping.de.
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| To get help, send a message to
majordomo@edge.ping.de
containing the single word "help".
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| To get a short description of the mailinglist for
VisualOberon, send a message to
majordomo@edge.ping.de,
containing the words "info VisualOberon" in the messagetext.
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| To subscribe to the mailinglist also send a message to
majordomo@edge.ping.de
using the command "subscribe VisualOberon" in the
messagetext.
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