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What 2D GUI Foundation Do You Use?
Zmee writes "I am looking to build a 2D application for personal use and I will need to use a canvas to paint custom objects. I am trying to determine what foundation to use and have not located a good side-by-side comparison of the various flavors. For reference, I need the final application to work in Windows; Linux is preferred, but not required. I have looked at WPF, Qt, OpenGL, Tcl/Tk, Java's AWT, and others. I have little preference as to the language itself, but each of the tutorials appear to require significant time investment. As such, I am looking to see what the community uses and what seems to work for people prior to making that investment."
HTML and Javascript?
Nothing is easier for amateurs, even though I'm no Microsoft fan.
I'd use Java AWT or OpenGL. They're both cross-platform, and what you learn will can be easily leveraged elsewhere, since they're widely adopted technologies. (No matter what you pick, you're going to have some learning curve.)
Having used everything on the list and much more (such as wx, GTK, etc), as well as making my own toolkits for embedded devices and products, my personal experience tells me hands down that Qt is the best choice for anything GUI related. It's power, ease of use, tools, documentation and learning curve are unparalleled to this day and age. Any other toolkit or API I've use fails in one or more of such areas.
Qt is the only toolkit that made me feel as if they could know in advance everything i'd ever need (so when i go to the docs it's there, right how as i imagined it should be), yet keeping the bloat down with great modularization. I have used it from C++ as well as from Python with great success.
I use the Qt framework at home and at work and I have published a couple teeny GPL'd apps:
Regardless of which framework you decide to use, I wish you luck!
OpenGL? "Lightweight"? Sure, I suppose because it's all implemented in the system, you don't have to redistribute much, but have you actually ever written anything remotely complicated in raw OpenGL? For anything resembling a GUI, the poster is going to spend months of writing low-level code that's been done a thousand times already.
Qt is heavy, but it's heavy for a reason - it includes a very nice set of tried-and-true widgets, with all the nice features and weird corner cases thought of already. It's also fairly speedy, and even more so if you use QGraphicsView, which can be optionally accelerated via OpenGL for even more speed.
Qt also has nice support for custom widgets. You can subclass any widget, or QWidget, and make anything you want. You can even integrate your custom widgets with Qt Designer, either by promoting a placeholder widget, or writing a Designer plugin so your widget is WYSIWYG.
OpenGL is so low level that everything I talked in the last two paragraphs is completely beyond its scope. Even font rendering is rather arduous, and good luck with nicely word-wrapped, formatted text.
Who suggested Java AWT? What is this, 1998? Someone is behind on their homework :).
Java's Swing + Java2D is *fully hardware accelerated* (ever since Java 1.6.0_u10 some time ago), multi-platform, with good multi-thread support (not for rendering, you don't need that, but for the rest of the program), very customizable, and looks fantastic with the Nimbus look&feel (a standard part of Java). Swing is used a lot on the enterprise desktop (and a few shrink wrapped products too - I know I've purchased some as they were best-of-breed tools). Many of the Java Swing ttools are free and there are a lot of them (eg. Matisse in Netbeans makes creating GUIs a snap). Java2D had extensive contributions from Adobe who happen to know a thing or two about presentation. Plus, drawing in Java2D also allows printing relatively simply.
I use QT and love it too, but it has some serious drawbacks, from my perspective. The biggest is that it requires a wonky special compilation system. You either have to use the build system they offer (qmake) or you have to manually run their generator yourself (moc - though if you were a masochist you could learn to write out the files moc makes yourself and avoid using it).
I compare every IDE to Eclipse, because that's the best IDE I've seen for any language. But I've never found that CDT, the C++ plugin for Eclipse, is any good. It fails to work out of the box for me and is a pain to configure (but I haven't tried it in a few years). QT Creator, while usable, is really an immature product. There's no support for refactoring, the UI is unintuitive and awkward (for me, at least) and there's lots of little issues with it. Plus you're committed to MingW, which can be a problem depending on what libraries you want to use. Codeblocks is a pretty good IDE, but it doesn't have a QT plugin, so you're left with the problem of dealing with moc files. Visual Studio has a plugin, but it only works with the paid versions.
All of this can be dealt with (and I do) but it's annoying.
I don't have much time... I write the GUI, and any drawing logic with Tcl/Tk. Easy, portable. Any time critical or extensive logic gets pushed into C or FORTRAN (depending on what it is). Just standard in/standard out. Parse the output with Tcl, and display.
A recent example -- I needed to upgrade some systems for a client (Solaris 6 to 10). We needed to identify the binary parts (non-OS) that needed to move. I wrote a GUI tool (binport) for this. Took 2 days to write, ran on Linux and MacOS X (two of us shared the work). After the job, the tool was essentially discarded.
No time to "debug" really, and I don't typically have time for compile and test cycles. Tcl is an interpreter, with very simple syntax and semantics.
Other examples that have used Tcl/Tk -- the GUI layer for GDB, Redhat Source Navigator, etc.
Yes, it's not "sexy", or even particularly "new", but it works, and works well.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
(For those that missed the reference, this is it)
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)