Hi Fons and rooters, Fons ... your answer as well as the overall situation around ROOT GUI are rather disappointing. I am inside the "root gui" business for about two years and frankly speaking I do not see any radical changes or even a sign of them. Java GUI, native ROOT NT GUI projects seem to be not very successful and far from being completed in the nearest future. We have also learnt that people come and go but not much of their developments go into root, especially if we talk about GUI where things are quite system-oriented and require deep knowledge of low-level aspects of an underlying API. I respect Fons and his attempts to create an in-house GUI framework but at the same time I understand that it is not physically possible to compete with the teams of specialized programmers developing professional GUI libs. This means root will always be behaind the leaders and this makes me sad. Whatever brilliant classes for data analysis I/we produce it is not competitive if I/we put them in a box standing below standards. Of course it is not even needed in most cases to have a full house of fancy widgets but for serious applications this is the most critical point. I do not even talk about commercial use of root but about my experience with root native IDE, a modification of my r-quant for daq and on/off line hep data analysis. A number of people use it now and I am tired to answer their questions about missing features in the gui/help system/etc. They all work with windows and they expect the same standard features from any program. So either you kill the Bill or you follow the standards. Well, in short, don't you think it would be nice to put some effort in development of Qt-root properly working interface? We saw from Denis&co work that it is possible... in principle. On the other hand I have noticed that their interface is far from being completed, i.e. TRint should be included in the event loop, QRootCanvas doesn't functioning properly in some cases, etc. Also, I think it might be possible to use native root widgets running under CINT... or even use two event loops. Why not? I do not think that Qt license limitations can prevent us from using it. First of all it is free under linux and root team doesn't need to include the qt source in the root distributions if Qt use is optional. It must be included if one wants to redistribute his/her qroot application. Or buy a license. In fact I do not understand all this noise around Qt licenses. There is no free lunch and good things cost money. I prefer to pay 1.500 greens from my pocket instead of waiting another two-three-??? years until root gui gets native simulation of QTable or QTextBrowser or become ported on NT. Finally, I think Fons and Rene have made a very nice and outstanding framework for data manipulation/analysis/visualization. Let's spend time on those features, making root the best in the world of data analysis. There is a number of roads to go. I do not think our goal is to beat Qt or MFC with root gui. Let's not spend much time for that! Regards, Anton
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