Deprecate XPCE

[Anniepoo]

Jan re XPCE in 'the book':

I'm surely not in favour of discussing XPCE in a real world Prolog book. I think we should consider it deprecated, although it is still a vital part of the IDE and several applications. I can even imagine it makes sense to use if for something new ...

Good to know. There certainly are still times that call for a 'real' GUI. I have a little timer I use during talks that works well in XPCE. I can't imagine that being in a browser. Since this really isn't on topic of 'the book', I'm making a new issue for XPCE.

Obviously we're at a point where deprecating XPCE is dependent on having a replacement for the IDE.

[wouterbeek]

Anjo Anjewierden's invention was innovative for it's time (e.g., pre-Java) but is currently superseded by the Web as the new UI paradigm. Tagged as "IDE" since deprecation will mostly depend on there being a new IDE.

[XVilka]

WebUIs are becoming not that popular again, becuase of their memory consumption. Using something like QML for UI description perfectly fits the Prolog spirit, and uses modern toolkit (Qt) to draw the interface.

[Anniepoo]

and I'm building a tangible user interface that needs tighter feedback than a webui gives me, at the moment.
I have few objections of the API of XPCE. The objections are:

1. threading issues
2. lack of support for modern images
3. lack of support for modern GUI features

Could we just replace the guts? Then we wouldn't need to replace the IDE.

[JanWielemaker]

In theory we can modernise XPCE. Making it multi-threaded is probably hard. Images are easily replaced. Using e.g. libcairo we could get proper low-level graphics. Giving the widgets a modern look is a lot of typing though. Then we are facing the move to wayland on Linux and we should use native graphics on MacOS. All in all these are major projects. Is someone is willing to pick this up, I'm happy. It doesn't fit my priorities as far as I can judge them at the moment. I'll make sure it keeps running as I heavily depend on the native IDE, but that is all.

Possibly http://www.swi-prolog.org/pack/list?p=plgi is a way out in the long run for local graphics. There is also the Qt based work by Carlo Capelli.

[Anniepoo]

let me see if I can find available programmer + Stripe grant