An app is born and more about the future of SWI's development tools

Hi,

After all the heat, it is time to test whether the `applification' of
SWI-Prolog will land in the Mac community.  The application is ready
for download from (this is a temporary place):

	http://www.swi-prolog.org/download/MacOSX/SWI-Prolog-6.5.1.dmg

Surely, it is still a bit rough.  It contains

  - The main executable, swipl-win which is a graphical Qt-based
    application mainly provided by Carlo Capelli.
  - The usual commandline tools in Contents/MacOS

It has been compiled on MacOS 10.7 (x64 Intel).  I have no clue on which
platforms it will run.  Getting one application that runs on a fair
range of Mac OS versions would be great ... Comments welcome.


## About IDEs and versions.

Some mails reached the list and me with worries about the future and
status of the various SWI-Prolog versions. I'll try clarify some points.

  - First of all, SWI-Prolog itself is a *library*.  It is pretty
    unlikely anything will change to this concept.

    - With a very small main program you have the usual application
      that communicates with the user through standard streams with
      or without fancy stuff such as (GNU-)readline.  See src/pl-main.c.
    - And, you can also talk to it using the C interface with many
      other interfaces on top of this (Java, C#, Python, Perl, ...).

  - Second, there are XPCE based IDE tools: PceEmacs, gtrace, gxref,
    thread monitor, exception trapping interface, etc.  These form
    the `native' IDE and are accessible from any other IDE as long
    as there is XPCE accessible graphics (Windows or X11).  Whether
    these are there to stay is unclear.  XPCE is considered old and
    ugly.  X11 seems to be fading away, although I expect it to be
    available as an add-on on most platforms for quite a while.

    The good news is that most of the logic behind these tools is
    written in Prolog and a lot is already separated from XPCE,
    mostly thanks the cooperation around PDT (see below).

  - Then, on Windows, there is swipl-win.exe, a tiny Windows based
    app that merely adds some menus to a console.  It is widely
    critized for being slow, buggy, not Windows compliant, etc.

  - Carlo wrote a replacement in Qt (a platform independent C++
    GUI toolkit).  This has now more or less the same functionality
    as swipl-win.exe.  It avoids most of the bugs of the old
    swipl-win.exe, but it is still in testing phase and quite
    likely comes with its own bugs.  The plan though is that this
    will be bundled with the binary releases for all platforms once
    it is considered stable enough.

    It makes the system a bit easier accessible and allows for one
    guide for all platforms.

  - Some people like running SWI-Prolog under (GNU-)Emacs.  That will
    work as long as people maintain a Prolog mode for (GNU-)Emacs, as
    this only relies on the commandline version.

  - There is SWI-Prolog Editor by Gerhard Röhner.  I _think_ this
    encapsulates the old Windows swipl-win.exe.  That may require
    changes to deal with the Qt based one.  I'm planning to drop
    the old swipl-win.exe, simply because it is not portable and
    buggy.

  - Last (but not least), there is PDT, the Eclipse based IDE from
    Guenter Kniesel and his group.  According to Paul Singleton,
    the availability of this tool is of considerable value for
    commercial users.  The Bonn group is quite determined to maintain
    this and we closely cooperate to get cleaner interfaces between
    Prolog and PDT.  This cooperation has proven to be productive
    for both ends.

These are the things that exist. Then, by Torbjörn Lager, me and
probably some more people that will cooperate, web-based development
components start to become available. These tools can play many roles.
We can use them for web based applications, (cooperative) web-based
development tools, remote debugging of (embedded) Prolog systems or as
GUI IDE tools for Carlo's Qt based framework and I assume they can also
be used by PDT.

One can surely state that it would be great if there was this one great
and fabulous development environment for all Prolog systems. I don't
think that will happen as long as we live in a free world ...  There
are simply too many preferences and systems differ so much that a
general IDE will be completely crippled.

	Cheers --- Jan
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