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Hi Andre,Unlike a business, an open source project does not have a team of salesmen. Therefore, no one is likely to step up and say, "please use us!" Folks visiting this website and mailing list are not part of a company.
I can however, since I have contributed heavily in the last week to this project, and have written a ton of software in my life, comment on your questions:
** Your development team is more important than your starting code base. Pay more attention to who you hire, than the software starting point. Interview hundreds of folks if you have to. This is far more important than your starting code base. You want a goose that lays golden eggs, you don't need a single golden egg.
** There was a time when Java was a faster language to develop in because of the fast edit, compile, run cycle, but that is no more. C++ and the machines that execute the compilers are now to the point where you can edit, compile, test, about as fast with C++ as with Java. Somebody might like Java more than C++ from a maintainability point of view. C++, if misused, can be hard to understand for new team members. Java is more straight forward.
** Properly written Java code would be fast enough for a user interface type application. I've done this, just try and minimize object instantiation, as "new"-ing objects in Java is about the slowest thing you will run into.
** One of the projects you are looking at is written in C, not C++. The other you mentioned is not even open source. So doesn't this bring you back to Kicad? I would not start from a project written in C. C is fine for embedded or operating system work, but you don't want to program on your hands and knees.
** Plan on spending a week studying each of your candidate choices, then the solution will become obvious.
** Building a bridge from Java to the C++ object model in Kicad is not advised. Most of your work will be at the user interface level, and the object tree can quickly be reproduced in Java if Java was what you were going to use at the user interface. Trust me, I've spent that last 6 years doing exactly what I am telling you not to do. :)
** As far as open source projects go, the Kicad project is less of a project than it is a hobby started by its original author. I say this in full respect of the fine work done by Mr. J.P. Charras, but I would feel better about this being a true "project" if there was a clear mission statement or road map, better communication from Mr. Charras, assigned roles, adopted standards, a bug database, a feature enhancement database, and a distinct statement from Mr. Charras that he really wants this effort to be a team effort. Most of the time we cannot even get answers to direct questions when posted on the mailing list. So why have I given the last week of my valuable software engineering time to this project?
** The design of Kicad is actually quite good, and I think it has potential to truly be excellent. I played with the gEda package for about 1/2 year. If I remember it is written in C, and I think so out of religious grounds. Being religiously opposed to C++ is silly at this point. Being religiously opposed to the use of the more exotic parts of C++ might make sense. Kicad is not over using C++. wxWidgets is a decent cross platform gui. It is good enough.
** Recently there has been some work to marry python on top of Kicad. There is also a binding from wxWidgets, on which Kicad is based, to python, called wxPython. Getting all this to run on Windows takes some doing: Kicad+python+wxWidgets, but I think the sky is the limits at that point. If you do not need user macros and have a C++ developer available to you, then the python might just get in the way for the user. Imagine the customer installation process.
** We would encourage you to review the GPL license under which the Kicad project is licensed. As you seem to understand, any distribution on your part of a derivative work would call for you to make that source code available. And if you would be so kind as to actually contribute it back into the core Kicad project, well then we could avoid a fork and we could benefit from each others' work indefinitely. (Provided we can agree on a direction, and have sufficient dialog to agree or not to agree.)
** Now that we have helped you, could you please help us by stating in detail what it is about the Kicad project that does not meet your needs in full now? We can discuss these deficiencies, and queue up these remarks for our future "feature enhancement database" :) (Igor Help!)
See, by asking for customer feedback, we are making a weak attempt to act like a business. But I'll stop now, before I get carried away :)
Dick
Hi everyone, we are currently looking into several EDA suites as a potential base for a new software we are developing. It will essentially be an extremely simplified EDA tool targeted at the needs of designers and artists, who want to bring their breadboard-based prototypes to a PCB. We are affiliated with the Arduino prototyping platform (http://arduino.cc). We would like to program our own GUI, but build on existing software for the backend (like routing, checking, exporting). The most interesitng tools we found so far are KiCad, gEDA and EAGLE, and would appreciate if you could help us make a decision. The most important questions at the moment are these: - Do you think that KiCad is suited for such an approach? Are its functional parts cleanly separated from the GUI? - Would it be possible to write a Java GUI (we are favouring Eclipse GEF at the moment) and write Java wrappers for the KiCad libraries? Or should we use Qt Jambi to integrate closer with KiCad? - Why should we choose KiCad over gEDA or EAGLE (features/adaptability/..)? If we choose KiCad, we would of course contribute back to this very nice project and be interested in hiring an experienced KiCad developer. Last but not least, if our software takes off as Arduino did, this would bring a ton of new users for KiCad. :) Thanks a lot for your insights and support, Andre Knoerig Interaction Design Lab Univ. of Applied Sciences Potsdam Yahoo! Groups Links
-- Best Regards, Dick *** If he runs, I will be supporting Tom Tancredo for President in 2008. *** http://tancredo.house.gov/ http://www.teamtancredo.com/ http://tancredo4prez.blogspot.com/
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