[H-GEN] Qt

Andrae Muys amuys at contal.net.au
Fri Sep 20 03:22:03 EDT 2002


[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
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Shaw, Steven wrote:
> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
> 
> If you are even thinking about using Java but don't like Swing, you could consider using SWT (the gui toolkit from the eclipse IDE project). Here is the best link I can find:
> 
> http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-swt-home/faq.html
> 
> I haven't used it. I've only heard good things about the Eclipse IDE.

I haven't used Eclipse, but it is the basis for Websphere Studio V4.0 which 
I have used.  Studio is impressive, although incredibly memory hungry (I 
would recommend 1Gb RAM, 512Mb isn't really enough to satisfy it;  Don't 
bother asking what it does with the memory, I wouldn't have a clue).

As far as cross-platform gui's are concerned, the first question to ask is 
which language/environment you wish to use, the choice of GUI framework is 
always going to be constrained by the language.

Options include:

Qt - as discussed, GPL which is a major bother as there are more then 
enough OSS lib's that remain incompatible, let alone any proprietary stuff 
you may need to use.  I am also unaware of how mature any non-C++ language 
bindings are, the library was always very C++ biased.

Gtk+ - LGPL so bypasses the license issue.  C-based, with a number of 
mature language bindings.  The Windows port is increasingly stable, I would 
feel confident that any project currently in inception will find the port 
matured by alpha.

tk - The 'original' cross-platform GUI.  Still by far the most ported, and 
language neutral toolkit I know of.  Of course it's ugly as hell, and the 
newer kits tend to have nicer API's.

wxWindows - I know very little about it except that it's a C++-based api, 
and every man and his dog in the python community seems to swear by it for 
unix/windows development.

Motif - Proprietary cross-platform libs available.... You can start 
screaming now if you like... ;)

Swing/AWT - Somehow Sun, despite sponsoring Tcl/Tk, managed to create one 
of the few modern API's that are actually worse.  To be fair, they 
developed it with a huge handicap... oh, and you have to use Java, but I 
repeat myself.

Andrae


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