Please god don't make yet another GUI toolkit. Pick one and start coding.
Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
11–20 of 57 posts
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#12Small note about Qt being for C++: There is Qt Jambi which is Qt for Java.
http://doc.trolltech.com/qtjambi-4.4/html/com/trolltech/qt/q...
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#13You forgot Swing+Java/Jython/JRuby/Groovy/Clojure.
How I wish I could forget Swing.
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#14wxWidgets is "big" because it has features. Considering it meets all your other criteria (aka features), in addition to ones you'll only find out you need halfway through a project, I would look closer at it. Use wxGlade and wxPython if you want easy, C++ if you demand compiled. Use dabo ( http://www.dabodev.com ) if you are interfacing with databases.
I have been using wxWidgets for about 5 years now with C++. At first, it was really difficult to do everything in code, hard to change GUI when you need to, very time consuming. But still it was the best option, our project was cross platform. It was also difficult to understand how to build and link.
However, once you get the basics it's quite fast and also have threads, networking, file streaming etc, so you don't need a zillion of libraries to do every little thing. Oh, and it has a great OpenGL support (see my projects at http://www.ccsoft.com.tr for screenshots)
With the help of wxFormBuilder (a free design tool), now design and modfications are very much faster.
Besides, it's been there for about 15 years. There is a decent documentation, a book, a large community to answer your questions.
My only plan is to do a project on wxPython and polish my python knowledge and see which (C++ or Python) suits me better.
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#15You forgot Swing+Java/Jython/JRuby/Groovy/Clojure.
and AIR.
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#16If coding in Java is an option, I would highly recommend SWT (http://www.eclipse.org/swt/). It's the toolkit that was used to build Eclipse, and it has a very 'native' look & feel (click the link for examples).
Plus, Java itself is cross-platform. Might be just what you're looking for.
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#17That should be obvious: cross-platform GUI toolkits are so hard that there isn't any that you like. It takes a good design or lots of people working on it full-time. So either you pay for Qt or deal with other problems. That's one reason that web programming has become so popular.
There seems to be another factor if you add OS-X to the required platforms: the way of GUI programming for Macs is conceptually different from Windows or Linux.
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#18The current Tk (8.5 and above) looks a lot better, using native widgets where possible, and Starkit makes deployment of Tcl/Tk applications a breeze. Those who forget history are doomed to reimplement it.
I think that Tcl and Tk have a terrible "marketing operation" and haven't done a very good job of getting the word out about things like this - it's a huge improvement.
This has some screenshots, which are a bit out of date, but show that things have improved:
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
#19Yeah it has always bothered me that GUIs are so annoyingly hard to make. I used to use Python a lot and Tk wasn't exactly a dream to work with even if something very basic was easy to get up and going.
However now I use Swing+miglayout+CLojure and making GUIs is supereasy.
Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?
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