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GUI Toolkits for the X Window System
TeachingMachines writes "Leslie Polzer has written a nice summary of the current state of GUI Toolkits for the X Windows System (article title of the same name). Those of you who are planning to spend hours and hours scouring the Internet for a mature cross-platform GUI toolkit may save some time and trouble by reading this summary. Leslie's review covers the pros and cons of using GTK+, Trolltech QT, FLTK, wxWindows, and the FOX Toolkit."
It's far more easily cross platform than the competitors. It's a rich GUI toolkit, not limited by least-common-denominator weirdnesses, and backed by a world class rendering layer (java 2D).
Todays Java is not at all what old Java was. It's far faster, and only getting faster with each release, than in the past, far more reliable, far more complete, etc.
This made the article useless. I wonder if he has ever tried QT. It just works! No futzing around. He is biased because you have to pay for the windows port.
I need to write GUI code that works on all Linux, all HP-UX, all SUN Solaris, all SGI platforms without requiring more than a simple "make".
Our customers would not like it if I told them to find and install version 1.2 of GTK and stuff like that, because in all honestly, on any platform other than Linux most of these toolkit libraries have no simple install mechanism and tend to be buggy.
So Xlib all the way... Simple and it runs on even a 10 year old version of Linux.
I personally think Qt is made irrelevant by both of the others because they are not missing anything Qt offers. The tools that come with Qt may not be bundled with them, but comparable tools do exist and can be used free of charge, and most often as Free Software. Qt's biggest weaknesses are its relic called "MOC" and its business orientation. Yes, it's GPL, but not for MS Windows, so you're not really free. FOX and (especially) wxWindows offer similarly advanced sets of widgets and techniques, so you might as well throw Qt away. In terms of portability, it's the same, and wxWindows even adds OS/2 portability. Believe me, I don't want to be unfair to Trolltech or upset dedicated Qt developers. I tried to be objective, and that's my objective conclusion. Maybe we can discuss this point in the comments for this article.
There is a disturbing trend of recent articles that engage in Qt/KDE bashing. Can't help wondering whether it is really a coincidence or not. For instance, here's another freshmeat editorial from a few months back.
Program in what you like...
Although programming in QT won't get it included into gnome and programming in GTK won't get it included in KDE.
A lot of apps people develop never see the light of day... I've programmed hundreds of little apps for the various companies I've worked for.. I programmed in what I liked.. and what I was used to...
Just because you need to create a little app with a textbox and a button doesn't mean you need to include the HEAVY libraries of gtk/qt/gnome/kde.
Just my thought.
ChiefArcher
One way to avoid this problem of dependencies, and also to really boost the useability of your app, is to try hard to separate the GUI from the "guts" of the application, so it is reasonably easy to write multiple UIs (GUI or CLI) for the same application. Then you, or others, can come and develop new UIs for themselves. For example, when I started developing QuickRip, I began with a (Py)Qt interface. Someone requested a CLI interface, so I made the separation, and gave QuickRip two interfaces. Now some (Py)Gtk developers are adding a Gtk interface, because they don't want to use Qt. Lovely.
:)
Of course this approach is only usually worth it when most of the hard work is done in the guts, and when the UI itself isn't that much work to redo in a different toolkit. Nor does it work when you need a feature than is only available in a specific toolkit. But in many instances, it works fine.
So often there's no need to choose between toolkits... just choose them all!
When wxWindows gets decent support for toolkits other than Gtk+, it will make this even more trivial.
"What you get when you download Qt 2/3 is the free X11 version ("Qt Free Edition") which enables you to write non-commercial applications for The X Window System. When you want to create commercial, proprietary, or non-free software, or want to compile your program for Windows or embedded systems, you'll have to pay for the Qt Professional or Enterprise version (both are quite expensive). Qt tried to specify this in their own license (the "QPL") because they felt the GPL could cause them some problems (please see freshmeat article #180 for more information). From Qt 2.2 and upwards, you can now freely choose between the QPL and GPL before building the libraries. That's the whole story; if you feel I missed an important point, feel free to correct me (Qt flames go straight to /dev/null, though). You can read more about Trolltech's licensing issues in freshmeat articles #170, #172, and the one mentioned above."
The author probably doesn't understand the GPL. All of the other tool kits distributed under the GPL can be used in commerical applications and SO CAN THE GPL'ed version of QT. You just have to accept the terms of the GPL to do so, IE: your application must be open sourced! In this sense QT has an avantage! If you buy their commerical license you may then close source your application. What they have done is allow you to pay extra to by-pass the GPL. How is this an evil thing? The other kits do NOT give you a choice, it's the GPL or nothing! Choice is good. QED.
QT != evil.
I agree. I came across GNUstep two months ago and was amazed by its incredibly simple API. I quickly made my first app, Charmap, a character map which uses Unicode.org's standards files to provide a wealth of information about any character. This was easy and fast because GNUstep provided solid Unicode/UTF-8 support from the start. While for example GTK was a pain to use until 2.0 with regards to non-Latin scripts, GNUstep at the same time had one of the most advanced string classes.
Not only is GNUstep concise and simple, but because Apple's Cocoa is also an implementation of the OPENSTEP standard, one can use Cocoa docs in GNUstep programming. This allows the programmer to tap into abundant resources online and in print.
If you're interested in what's going on in the GNUstep world, my favourite resource is www.gnustep.us, which lists the latest news and updates. I hope I don't sound like a karma whore, I'm just super-enthused about a fantastic API that doesn't get the attention it deserves.
GPG Key ID: 8C444E97 Fingerprint: E7BA D851 9714 8D97 C4F9 1777 8168 6913 8C44 4E97
also, the author misses a another buig point. I spoke to trolltech support about having to release code under GPL using the free liscense, and they agreed to only have it apply to code that actually included QT code.
For example, I have written an emulator which I havent open sourced yet, and 95% of the code is ANSI C++. Why should i need to open source the whole thing? I found them very accomidating in the fact that I would only have to open source the the parts that actually used the QT classes.
All in all QT is the best object oriented toolkit out there, they are a very professional company and a previsouly noted this should be a moot point when anylizing the toolkit itself.
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