Slashdot Mirror
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."
You haven't provided nearly enough information. Are you talking GUI interfaces, or rendering? If rendering, is it raster or vector? If vector, then what primitives do you need? Full SVG? Is this real-time, and if so, how many polygons / pixels do you need to push and at what minimum framerate?
As a totally shoot-from-the-hip, off-the-wall recommendation, I'd say OpenGL for portability, including support on iPhone / iPad / iPod touch. Note that you'll want to stick to the OpenGL ES subset in that case.
Better known as 318230.
If you want 'easy' with a slightly 'limited' set of options long term, then I would say Windows Forms in a .NET language, use Mono rather than VisualStudio so you have a much easier chance of it working in Linux out of the box, and most likely OSX, FreeBSD and several others in the process. Its not required, but Mono's code completion will point you in the right direction where as VisualStudio is going to point you more towards MSy things. Though VisualStudio is much more enjoyable to use in my opinion. If you've never used either, its not likely to matter for a while I suspect, though on OS X, Mono seems to miss most initial clicks I send to it, could just be me.
That will give you all the basic controls an application gui will need and make it so you can reuse the massive amount of examples out there.
For your custom painted widget its a little different. What kind of painting are you doing?
Is it something that lends itself to OpenGL really well? If its fits well into geometric primatives, then I would go with OpenTK's OpenGL Control. Works pretty good in my experience.
How often does it update the displayed data? Is it a game/animation kind of thing or are we talking about something that renders once after the user changes a setting?
If you need a high FPS on the updates, you're going to want to use OpenGL with textures for displaying the rasterized data. You're learning curve will be a little steep I think if you're starting from no knowledge, but its probably your only solution for something that needs to be fast (I'm just flat out ignoring DirectX, which for Windows would be easier than OGL but would cut you off of Linux and the advantages on Windows aren't that great really)
If you have real slow update rates, then you could just throw a image control on a form and paint the pixels yourself one at a time, or load images from a file/resource.
If this is a project that has a long expected life and will become rather complex and need high performance eventually, then you're probably going to do it wrong the first time no matter WHAT you do now, at least, thats my experience. I never get it right until AT LEAST the 3rd rewrite :/
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Stop suggesting various toolkits, that is NOT what he is looking for.
He is looking for a "canvas" widget, meaning he wants drawing API.
It is unfortunate that most drawing apis are tied to particular toolkits, so he may have to choose one, but if you are comparing them you have to compare the 2D drawing primitives.
There is also Cairo and OpenGL, which are not really tied to toolkits. Though you still need to jump through hoops depending on the toolkit to get it so the graphics calls draw where you want. Sigh.