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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?
I like wxWindows and especially it's a child project wxPython. wxPython is my favorite way to develop GUI apps because it is easy, flexible, cross-platform, and looks great. My only major wish for it is a Java port so Python/wxPython programs could be made portable to Jython. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
At my new employment I had a project that needed to be cross platform. I was itching to use Kylix, however it wasn't due to be finished for another 8 months. Looking into the details I saw that they built the corss platform support on QT.
After checking out the QT tutorials I was immediatly hooked. QT is intuitive; I can't think of many other APIs I would grace with this description. In addition to being well thought out it has a superb implementation. I've been using it happily for 2 years.
The only thing I miss is the strong third party component community that Delphi/Kylix has. I'm a huge fan of "buy don't build". You can really put quality touches on your app by finding the right component someone else has already made.
-R
available with Eiffel Software's EiffelStudio development suite. It's called Vision2 and provides platform independent look and feel by using a bridge pattern to separate an interface layer from the underlying implementation layer (which uses the Win32 API and Gtk+ for the platform dependent stuff).
You can download the full EiffelStudio suite for linux (and Windows) and use it free for non-commercial software, Vision2 is included and is available here, it's free!
-- You see what happens when you have fun with a stranger in the Alps?
Eclipse does have a few glitches in the Linux version.
For those that don't know, Eclipse is based on a unique IBM GUI toolkit called SWT. It has a Java API, but the underlying code is native. The supposed advantage of this is that it can be used by any Java programmer as an alternative to Swing, but it's faster. The problem is that it's only available for Windows and Linux, and since the underlying code is native, it has to be separately developed and maintained. Since more GUI apps are run on Windows, there's more pressure to make the Windows code work right, and the Linux code is always a little behind.
I don't think there's any advantage to SWT these days, with Swing programming coming along so well. For anyone who doubts this, have a look at IntelliJ Idea, a really nice Java IDE that's Swing-based, and super fast. Frankly, I think Eclipse and SWT was a move to establish an IBM-centric Java community, with lots of vendor lock-in. Hijacking Java from Sun, if you will.
Eclipse *is* a really nice application, but I don't think IBM's motives in creating it were at all community-minded. And I don't have high regard, or high hopes, for SWT.
I'm a big fan of wxWindows - really nice look AND API, but I've had trouble getting any of the dialog editors to work (I'm under OS X), which has been something of an annoyance, since, as any GUI programmer can probably tell you, implementing GUIs entirely in code is a huge pain in the ass, and is harder to change later on than if you use a resource file...
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
Swing works on a single platform: Java. And not all Java, either.
For example, the way that Kuro5hin has dynamic threads. They keep a stub of each comment id, and then run javascript to dynamically load the comment's contents when requested.
I'm not sure whether it would have worked for you... real time graphical information -- so you needed to reload an image? How often?
It's not suitable when you want to change an image ten times a second, but if your application would suit 2 or 3 second updates then there's a lot you can do with Jabbascript.
Ahh Jabbascript.. the world doesn't know what you can do.
Tcl/Tk is great. Lots of people certainly get great mileage out of it doing "quick and dirty", but if you design your code right, it can be quite clean as well. Tcl is flexible enough, and has enough of its C API exposed that you can load OO as an extension - [incr Tcl] is a popular one, if you want to do OO. Of course, it's possible to do "design patterns" kinds of things even without that, you just have to be clever about it.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
And these are just my biggest objectsions. The Tk widget set is not bad. It is quite ugly and limited, but good enough for a small GUI app. The underlying language though is absolute crap.
The only good thing about Tcl is that it provides a (relatively) easy way of interfacing with C code: you can expose C functions as Tcl commands (e.g. you could map Tcl command foobar to C function MyFooBar()). This is, in fact, what Tool Control Language was designed for: exposing C functions to a high-level script to facilitate easy automated testing. However, trying to write a real application in Tcl is an excercise in futility. There are much better alternatives available. But, if all you have is a hammer, everyting looks like a nail -- that is why Tcl is the "past and future king".
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I know people won't be into this, considering the crowd here, but all the same:
I use Squeak Smalltalk as my cross-platform toolkit of choice. Squeak includes a cross-platform GUI toolkit, as well as a cross-platform language, IDE, runtime and configurable world of libraries. Once you get out of the rut of Tk, GTK+, etc and get used to the programming style, it makes so much sense, it's almost scary. I was doing Python+(Tkinter or wxPython) before Squeak.
What most people here will gripe about is that Squeak's GUI system, Morphic can't be called from C, C++ or Perl at this point. It's possible, but so far our users have been happy enough with Smalltalk not to move away from it. Squeak also has it's own UI look and feel- it's not Windows, Mac OS, or GTK+ in appearance. I may be in the minority, but I prefer a clean look to poorly emulated widgets. By default, the look and colors are a bit kidsy, but like everything in a Smalltalk system (ala emacs, but easier!), it's very configurable.
Squeak supports a lot more platforms that most of the combos mentioned here. Right now, Squeak supports: Mac OS X, Mac OS Classic (System 7 - OS 9; m68k and PPC), Windows >= 95, DOS, WinCE (StrongARM, XScale, MIPS, SH4), X11 on any modern Unix-like, Linux framebuffer (Linux PDAs and kiosks), SDL (lending support to PicoGUI and others), OS/2, and the Acorn RiscOS. It also runs on bare hardware on stock x86 machines, complete with drivers written in Smalltalk. There might be more, but that's should be most of them.
No, I would reccoment it to people who are wanting to create a business app for a homogonized work environment, but it has many uses.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad