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i can't attest to the speed of the wx bindings for perl, but i can tell you that the wx bindings for python (wxpython, here.) are fast. very, very fast.

GTK:
GTK

QT:
QT
Excellent QT Tutorial

wxWindows:
wxWindows
wxPython

Mozilla:
Mozilla
Cross-platform implementation of COM
develop your UI's in an XML dialect called XUL

Others:
FLTK
Fox Toolkit

Side-by-side comparison of GUI Toolkits:
The GUI Toolkit and Framework Page

I needed this list for my own use. Maybe it will be of interest to you.

If you want cross platform compatibilty with C++, then check out wxWindows. It has ports to Windows, MacOS (9 & X), UNIX + Motif, UNIX + GTK. It also has a very well developed Python binding -- so well developed that quite a few people want it adopted as the official Python GUI instead of TKinter.

So what about wxWindows? It uses GTK on Linux and native widgets on Windows and Mac. It also has bindings for Python, Perl, and wxBasic, along with its native C++.

The wxWindows folks also have a Macintosh port that I believe also uses CARBON. From what I understand they are doing a great job. For python people, wxPython is just fantastic.

;) http://www.wxpython.org

wxWindows, along with its various bindings (wxPython, wxPerl, etc...) is actually a very good cross-platform system. It's an entirely abstracted system for developing GUI applications using an OS'es native framework.

I honestly love writing all the apps I need for a windows system under FreeBSD, and only rebooting for debugging. There are a huge number of Device Contexts, Managed Windows, all the widgets you'll ever need... wxWindows is a dream. I swear by wxPython for GUI building.

There is also Boa Constructor for wxPython, a Delphi-like IDE.

Much nicer than Tk.

Have you tried wxPython?

When I use QT based environments, I feel like I am using a windows95 machine. The simple fact is that QT was designed to be used by windows converts, and was designed to work on a variety of platforms. It is not designed specifically for linux like gnome is, and so does not have a soul.

Many innovations found in GNOME are direct attempts to "ape" Microsoft, from compound documents to an implementation of Visual Basic for GNOME. Not that this is (all) bad; MS came up with some pretty good software design strategies, and GNOME is smart to follow the good ones.

That having been said, I use both KDE (on my home desktop) and GNOME (at work). They're basically the same as far as I can tell, from a UI point of view. There's a couple of minor differences (it's easier to use workspaces in GNOME; it's easier to set fonts in KDE; I like Konsole better; I like GTK's look-and-feel better), but they basically do the same things as each other, and both better than Windows. Which I think is the point.

GNOME is no longer designed specifically for Linux, as GNOME now must be working on Solaris and FreeBSD before it can be released.

If QT3 is to have any chance against gnome, it must become specific - it must become a pure linux environment.

Not bloody likely. In fact, one could argue that using a cross-platform environment such as Qt or wxWindows is closer to the hacker ethic of "solve the problem once." In fact, part of Python's success as a GUI building language is wxPython. I've also heard of cases where Qt/Python is used to build GUIs for software that's meant to run on Windows and UNIX, although that involves some expense...Qt is NOT GPL'd for Windows!!

OK, that's my two cents.

ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.

Really? Is Java 2 even available for FreeBSD yet?

Zooko goes to check.

Looks to me like it is still in beta. I strongly doubt that we would have more platforms if we had used Java.

This is not even counting the fact that we developed faster in Python than we would have in Java (I say this based on spending one year working full-time on a Java app and getting basically nothing shippable, and then spending one year working in Python and getting, well, Mojo Nation.) (Not, obviously, that I wrote Mojo Nation all by myself, but the point remains that I've seen Python apps come together way faster than Java apps.)

And this isn't counting the fact that the standard libraries that we used are in C/C++ and are very mature and widely supported than their Java equivalents. Don't get me wrong, I love Cryptix, not only because it was founded by some friends of mine, but because it enables cool tricks like hushmail , but it would've been dog slow to do our crypto in pure Java. The crypto library we use, Wei Dai's Crypto++ is about as fast as can possibly be (including hand-optimized assembly inner loops, if you are on x86). I know you can marry Java app code to native code (and I have done so, way back in the dark ages of Java 1), but the culture of Java frowns on this, whereas the culture of Python has fully embraced native-code integration from day one. Perhaps as a consequence of this, it seems easier to do in Python.

As to your comments about UI, I have to defer to your authority as a user. Personally, I like the HTML UI, and I would much rather have an HTML UI than an actual widget UI, but apparently most users in this world disagree, so you are right -- we should provide the latter.

To bring this conversation back to the topic at hand, has this argument been productive or destructive? I think that it has been useful to talk about the actual features offered by different languages / tools. It is good for programmers to learn from the experience of others. I do not think that Python is Good and Java is Bad. Java has several good features, such as integration with current browsers (allowing cool tricks like hushmail) and possibly good cross-platform UI (although I don't personally know how Swing compares to wxPython), and it has a security model that allows untrusted code, but cross-platform availability and rapid development are not among Java's strengths.

Regards,

Zooko

It has much less backward compatibility than any other version of Windows I've used, but the stability has definitely increased.

Sorry, are you talking about W2k or Linux in this sentence? (-:

Using Windows 2000 carries risks of being incompatible with the rest of your network.

Deja vu again, this reads just like Microsoft anti-Linux propaganda but you seem to be applying it to W2k...

The only compelling reason I can think of to go with Windows is speed of application development, both on web and desktop based applications.

This I will give you, but with significant reservations. The first is that tools like wxPython and Boa Constructor erase a lot of the differences for the desktop; the second is that snippets of PHP, Python etc seem to be a lot more reuseable in practice than chunks of ASPness, meaning that reaching for PHP templates for a new website is generally at least as productive as starting a new ASP; the third is that using tools lke Word and Frontpage for web design should be a hanging offense.

For those wishing to develop cross-platform applications, wxWindows and wxPython have been around for a long time. Much better than trying to use GTK on Windows (wxWindows uses GTK on Linux but the MS common controls on Windows).