What is Ebuilder?

• construct a hierarchy of widget and manipulate them through an easily accessible tree structure.
• add and edit member functions, including SIGNALs and SLOTs.
• add member variables of any kind to your design.
• add the necessary extra include files.
• load and save your design using a proprietary format.
• export your design to C++ code that can be compiled directly, without any further need for any part of Ebuilder.

Ebuilder was designed for maximum portability. Platform dependency has been limited to an absolute minimum. It should, therefore, build on many platforms, including Linux, Solaris and Windows NT/95.

Ebuilder comes with an easy-to-follow tutorial which will get you underway in no time. Look at the TUTORIAL file in the source distribution.

Ebuilder consists of an all-in-one executable file of less than one megabyte (dynamically linked) that will do everything.

Okay, that all sounds cool, but where are the screenshots?

What is it not?

Ebuilder is not intended to be an all-in-one solution for developing Qt applications. As stated above, it is a widget designer. It allows you to create a single widget at a time for your favorite Qt program. It does not provide:

• integrated building or debugging.
• a possibility to write code that goes into main().
• an elaborate C++ editor with automatic indentation and/or syntax highlighting.

Okay, so what are you gonna do about it?

I follow the philosophy (if you can call it that) of "the right tool for the right job". Call me oldfashioned, but I don't like a on-tool-does-it-all approach. An editor should edit code, a compiler should build it, and, big surprise, I use a debugger to debug it. Well, enough said about that. Main reason I don't support these features is that I consider the best solution to all of these shortcomings the use of external programs. This, however would involve heavily platform-dependent code, which is something I (still) want to avoid.

Revision history of Ebuilder

Yeah, yeah, but where are the screenshots?

Main new features in this release

• Generally, increased usability. Key mappings have been added for the arrow keys and windows-style ctrl-n, ctrl-o and ctrl-s key mappings are now supported. In addition, you can now use ctrl-x, ctrl-c and ctrl-v to cut, copy(only Qt 2.1 and above) and paste widgets in your design. The del key can be used to delete widgets and pressing the enter key display a widget's properties.
• Checks for changes to your design when you try to exit or load a new design. Remembers the file names you have provided for export and save/load.
• Total rework of the user interface of Ebuilder. Layout behavior was improved. Member functions and member variables are more accessible through the use of a TabWidget. Two toolbars have been added for fast access to the supported widget types.
• Major rework of much of the internals. Ebuilder is now more flexibily set up, which will make it a lot easier to extend.
• Support for QSpinBox and QSplitter widget types. By popular request I have added support for a user-defined widget that represents itself in your design as a rectangular box. It does, however, export correctly to C++.
• Rudimentary support for layouts. You can use QHBoxLayout, QVBoxLayout and QGridLayout in your designs. Support is limited to one layout per widget, and you will not be able to add struts and/or set stretch factors. More on layouts in Ebuilder.
• Ebuilder was built with Fortify, a very good freeware memory tracker tool created by Simon P. Bullen, to make sure it is completely free of memory leaks. Fortify is part of the ebuilder distribution, and can be used when building Ebuilder with debugging support.
• Support for win32. Thanks to efforts by Jan Stifter who took the time to test Ebuilder and build under Windows.
• Added a Tmake project file to the Ebuilder distribution for easier building and better platform suport.

Screenshots

Finally!

What is required for compiling Ebuilder?

• Ebuilder will only compile and run with Qt version 2.0 or above!. To be able to make use of the widget copy functionality, you will need 2.1 or above.
• You need GNU flex to be able to build Ebuilder. Windows users should look at the cygnus download mirror list to find an ftp site near them which caries it. Unix users can check the GNU ftp mirror list to find out where to get GNU flex.
• I strongly recommend that you get Troll Tech tmake to compile Ebuilder using the ebuilder.pro file provided in the distribution. This will make compilation a lot easier.

Other GUI builder tools for Qt

• KDE studio (KDE) by theKompany
• QtEZ by Jan Prokop
• KDeveloper (KDE)
• QtArchitect