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Cross-Platform GUI Toolkits (Again)?

Posted by Cliff on from the windows-on-as-many-OSes-as-possible dept.

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?

3 of 514 comments (clear)

  1. QT convert by RiBread · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I developed apps with Delphi for 4 years and was completely sold that Borland had the best solution around.

    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

  2. The best cross platform GUI toolkit I've used is.. by Admiral+Akbar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?
  3. A few glitches in the Linux version... by aquarian · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.