Dear Sriram,

I do subscribe to the view that for an experienced programmer the use of IDE especially in UI intensive apps can make life easier, have experienced that in VB.net and C#.

However, since I have not executed equally large scale UI apps in Linux, I stick to my dose of Emacs/VIM and the GNU tools.

I'm an Eclipse platform developer, and I also program in Visual Basic 6 using COM style interface driven development. (Really, I'm a frameworks developer.) Thinking in objects has caused me to shun the conventional data driven development that's typical in Visual Basic 6. My work is MVC based and I've been designing COM components and reusable user interfaces in Visual Basic 6 when required.

Yup GTK+ apps are widely developed using the MVC structure.

My questions:

1. Are there other such programmers on this list ?

2. Could any of the programmers on the list tell me if GNOME/KDE

programming has an equivalent of Visual Basic so far as a development environment for writing class code is concerned ?

Yes, KDE (http://www.kdevelop.org/) which comes part of the KDE bundle, and supports QT.

GNOME (Glade) comes bundled with GNOME in most distros and supports GTK+.

Besides which I believe for GTK extension in .net that is GTK# you can use Mono's IDE.

Well theoretically GTK+ and QT are written in a OOP fashion, and support Class based development, which is the only way out for large projects with thousands of components.

Besides the above you can use SDL & OpenGL (Mesa3D) which supports Class based development, because its impossible to write games without having a mammoth project with thousands of classes. But don't know of any IDE which provides for drag-and-drop functionality.

From what I understand a large percentage of *Nix developers stick to

handcoding using VIMs and Emacs rather than use IDEs, because that is the way programs have been written traditionally.

But my guess is that as more and more programmers include Linux as a platform for standard application release, there would be greater emphasis on IDEs since it definitely cuts down development cost at the UI design stage and latter in the maintenance. Also it's a boon for newbies to reduce the learn-to-develop cycle.

I know of the Gnome-Java bindings and of libgnome, but I was just curious to know the general programming trends and preferences of the list members.

Also, I know that I can google out this information, and perhaps play with Glade , etc, but I'm more interested in meeting other programmers such as myself.

I hope my answers have been helpful.

Take care, Paul Alapatt