Forum Enters into 7th Year

[srvet_claudio]

Happy new year HMG Forum !

Viva HMG, viva Roberto Lopez, viva Sri Rathinagiri !

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[bpd2000]

Happy new year HMG Forum !

Viva HMG, viva Roberto Lopez, viva Sri Rathinagiri !

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[quartz565]

Happy new year HMG Forum !

Viva HMG, viva Roberto Lopez, viva Sri Rathinagiri !

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[danielmaximiliano]

Felicitaciones a todos los amigos de HMG.

por muchos años más !!


Congratulations to all the friends of HMG.

for many more years!

[luisvasquezcl]

Muchas felicidades y que sean muchos años más.
Mis agradecimientos a Roberto Lopez, Rathi, Claudio por su generosidad y apoyo que nos han brindado todos estos años.
Saludos cordiales,
Luis Vásquez.

[Roberto Lopez]

I'm a little nostalgic by these days... could be that I'm becoming an old man... sorry for that... but it appears to be unavoidable

By the end of 2001, Antonio Linares posted in Harbour group, a sample showing how to call C code from a .prg. That code was very simple (the MsgInfo function) and (of course) I've quickly copy pasted to a minimal console .prg.

It worked and, as you can imagine, I could not stop there

I've researched a little (basically from HWGUI and WHAT32 code) and added functions to create a main window and a message loop ('activate' method). Then, label and button arrived (button mesage handling was very hard at first:).

The code become bigger, so, I've separated the GUI code from the demo app. The GUI moved to 'minigui.prg'.

So, my first demo was renamed to 'maindemo.prg' and started with:

Code: Select all

SET PROCEDURE TO minigui.prg

The origin of the name could sound weird now (with thousands of users worldwide) but, for me, at that time, such GUI code was only a little experiment about a Win32 API and Harbour-C interface, then, the name 'MiniGUI' sounded 'logic'.

The enthusiasm of people at Harbour group, was so great, that animated me to go further...

At first, It was surprising for me, how bigger the minigui library users/testers/enthusiasts become.

Some time ago, I've was surprised again, with the new life that HMG got and that such process occurred beyond me (only an HMG user now).

It was the final test. The main ideas behind HMG (simplicity, powerfulness, easyness) are so strong and appealing that in one or other way, it will survive, and (obviously) this is thank to you.

My thanks to all of you.

VERITAS FILIA TEMPORE!

[serge_girard]

Niece piece of nostalgica Roberto, thank you !

Serge

[Rathinagiri]

That is a great sharing and caring Roberto.

Thanks a lot for telling the story of HMG. Really interesting.

[PeteWG]

Many thanks to all participants.
Special thanks to Rathinagiri for his tremendous work to keep this site
alive and of course to the founder, Roberto Lopez who made this great
'gui-thing' to happen, for the benefit of the community.

HMG is, indeed, one of the few complete and mature gui libraries,
that has been developed within the 'realm' of Harbour-project.
However, it was always a question why this excelent gui-lib
had not succeed to attract the interest of harbour's core-developers
(at least not to the extend it really deserves).
I wonder it was due to the (very controversial) concept of 'portability'
which always seemed to be dominant amongst harbour core-developers
along with a rather 'low' interest for 'gui things' in general?
That's not a criticism, just a not so happy fact.
But again, HMG users can be happy they have this fine tool at their hands.

best regards,

---
Pete

[Roberto Lopez]

I wonder it was due to the (very controversial) concept of 'portability' which always seemed to be dominant amongst harbour core-developers along with a rather 'low' interest for 'gui things' in general?
That's not a criticism, just a not so happy fact.

By the time of the first MiniGUI library releases, some of the Harbour core developers, started HBGUI.

It used direct WIN32API for Windows, GTK for Linux and 'something' for OS/2 (I don't remember how it was done ).

HBGUI achieved some basic functionality. It was compact, fast and simple, but, at some point, the developers, not agreed on design basics.

AFAIR, some of them, wanted, that all the Harbour level code (.prg) be the same for all supported platforms, and others considered that such thing was irrelevant, being only important, that the classes exposed to the users, be the same, despite the internal code differences.

Since HBGUI started when MiniGUI was experimental, I've planed to terminate it, when HBGUI had enough functionality.

IMHO, the decision of Harbour team(s) to not support/develop an official multi-platform GUI was a BIG MISTAKE.

The initial goal should be simple: Allow users, to use the Clipper 5.3 syntax (classes/commands) to create GUI apps. This scheme would have allowed to re-use Clipper original code, to create native/real GUI apps without modifications for all supported platforms (the holy grail of Clipper programmers).

If such a thing had been made on time, Harbour would have had a much greater success than had... anyway... is late for lamentations

Android is the new train and is already going ... I hope that they do not lose it.