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Cross-Platform GUI Toolkits (Again)?
Futurepower(R) queries: "It has been 2 1/2 years since the previous Ask
Slashdot about GUI Toolkits. There were many helpful comments then, such
as this
one. Since then, Slashdot has discussed wxWindows vs. MFC and considered the book, Creating Applications with Mozilla. The best comparison table is
apparently still the GUI Toolkit,
Framework Page. Which is the best cross-platform GUI toolkit that provides
native look and feel? Which is the best overall? What IDEs and other tools do
you use? What are the problems?" Slashdot also had a match-up between GTK+ and Qt, but some of you might have missed that one. How have recent changes in this ballpark changed your feelings on the issue?
Swing is functional and cross-platform, free-beer, and widely understood.
I have discovered a wonderful
If you're talking about true cross-platform compatibility, combined with ease of development and deployment, then Tcl can't be beat. It's always been good, but recent developments, such as the Starkitpackaging and runtime system, make it a hands-down winner.
It is hard to admit it, but when the mono team gets windows forms working correctly, C# and .NET are going to pick up a great deal of momentum, specially in the cross-platform GUI development area.
I myself would favour Swing over others, though I'm really only fully conversant with MFC. But I fully realise that it depends what you're doing.
If you're building a mass-market app you plan to sell you all of the great unwashed out there, then you probably need to make it look very Windows-centric. Practically speaking, something like a turbo tax is probably going to get 99% of its revenue from Windows users. Its crazy to use anything - like Swing - that doesn't give you the best, most up-to-date look on Windows (though Sun would claim it is native look and feel). Use MFC or something like that.
If on the other hand you're building something like an IDE, other factors come into play. The fact that your app runs on linux as well as Windows will probably be a key sales point to your target audience. And your app is probably far more complex than a mass market app - meaning you need good productivity and a strong underlying architecture(which, IMHO, Swing gives you). Your users are likely to care less about the memory requirements of a technology like Swing.
Or as a final example, if you're writing a game, then screw their sheety GUI ! Code everything yourself from lines, dots, and mouse events. Make your list boxes scrollable using human skulls as thumbtabs, have rats running up and down inside your text fields to show focus. (personally I would also use Swing for this but realise that may be straying into personal predjudice).
In summary, its no good saying "whats best". It depends on what you're coding.
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
As someone who writes SWT and eclipse apps for a living, I can say quite definitively that if you're aligning your widgets based on assumptions about pixels and whatnot you are in fact a moron. Microsoft won't let you use their logos with any app that does this either; they know that when Microsoft Windows 2008 comes out they might drastically change what your Win32/MFC calls produce on the screen and they want you assuming as little as possible. No professional programmer hacks it until it works, and if they do, it's certainly no more SWT's fault that it is GTK's fault when someone in a right-to-left language finds out how you didn't stick to the recommended methods.
Layout in SWT can be done any number of elegant cross-platform ways and only as an absolute last resort should you ever have to use absolute pixel amounts. And don't think this is just a cross-platform issue -- people who jack their font sizes for certain widgets up (namely, me) but not others find improperly laid out controls very very quickly. I can vouch that Eclipse in fact does not have much of this if at all. Typically, if you're coding this way, you need to go back to Layout Managers 101.
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
It would seem to me that the whole reason for .Net was to port vendor lock-in to new platforms in case Windows died and also to try to compete with Java. Now that Microsoft is being forced to stop distributing a sabotaged variant of Java and to instead distribute Java as specified in the original contract, Java is even more useful.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Remember Pascal? At one time, Pascal was the major development language. Pascal was taught at all the universities. But, an amazing thing happened. In a period of about 4 years, Pascal died. Hundreds of thousands of people had spent millions of hours learning the particular quirks of Pascal and of Pascal compilers. All of that time was lost.
If you have never lived through the loss of a major direction in your life, you may not even realize it can happen. The people saying I'm a troll in this thread probably haven't seen technology die.
Remember Powerbuilder? At one time there were about 1.5 million active Powerbuilder programmers.
No really, is Java dying? Now, I'm seeing, or think I'm seeing, the same thing with Java. The expected energy and support and standards have not appeared. Or have they? If I'm wrong, prove me wrong; I would like Java to be a success, that would simplify my choices. We bet part of our lives on our choices of specialization.
What frightens me is that there is so little support for GUIs in Java. When programmers don't work to improve their tools, they are consciously or unconsciously deciding that the technology does not warrant improvement.
I've seen Java programs that are unacceptably slow.
Sun mismanagement of Java makes people look elsewhere. The world is beginning to realize more fully that proprietary means, "I'm a dog on a leash; I'll bark whenever you yank my chain; please abuse me."
When you use Java, or any language in a way that is not fully compiled to native instructions, you give away your source code. Sure, what you give away is without comments or variable names, but nevertheless you may give away important routines. That's fine if you intend to make a gift of your work to the world; you should have the option not to do so. There has been surprisingly little work on full Java compilers; until Java has acceptable compilers, it hasn't proven itself. Is GCJ mature?
Visual Basic and Perl are written in C. Should it bother me about other languages that they are written in C or C++? Why not eliminate the middleman? Can an acceptable result for application development be achieved using something like Boundschecker and avoiding pointers and using automatic garbage collection where appropriate?
Slashdot has a moderation problem. You can't comment on and moderate the same story. So, moderators by definition moderate stories that don't interest them much.
Bet wrong and go back to being a novice. As I write this, the parent post has been moderated Flamebait=1, Insightful=1, Overrated=1, Total=3. The question is a real and important one, not a troll. When you pick a technology, you lose part of your quality of life if you are wrong; you go back to being a novice at something else.
If you know better, educate me. If I'm wrong, and you know better, educate me. That's the entire purpose of Ask Slashdot.
As I read the question, it was about a cross-platform toolkit with native look-and-feel. I definately interpret this as being native to the platform where it's run, not native to the toolkit! Otherwise the statement would be meaningless.
The discussion has, as usual, talked a lot about Tk, which has it's own look-and-feel and therefore certainly not is native. Qt is cross-platform, with applications that look native, but necessarily aren't.
There's more to a platform's look-and-feel than how the buttons look. The location of the menu-bar is one example. The placement of OK/Cancel buttons another, and standard quick-keys a third. Mac OS X has GUI guidelines which specify how far apart different controls should be, and they are almost guaranteed to not match KDE's guidelines.
Mac OS X/Cocoa also has the concept of sheets, which are basically modal dialogs attached to one certain document window in an application. There's no similar concept in e.g. Gnome, and a toolkit would therefore be hard pressed to find a replacement within the native look-and-feel. In fact multi-document applications in their entirety are differently handled on Windows, Linux and Mac. And I don't even think Gnome and KDE agree on all details of look-and-feel.
Cross-platform with native look-and-feel is therefore a lot more complex than just using Qt or Tk. What would really be needed is actually a way of abstracting away the GUI part of an application entirely, basically making the entire presentation into a Stylesheet of sorts, somtehing like what you do to strings and numbers for i18n/l10n.
But I haven't seen any real efforts to do this. It might work without it for Linux vs. Windows, because neither have very strongly enforced standards on look-and-feel, and you can therefore get away with doing things almost right (or even doing them wrong).