Re: Commercial Development

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Eric Wood <eric@interplas.com> writes:

> My company hasn't used the GTK+ toolkit as of yet so I may be
> out of place here.
> 
> In anyone's opion, is the GTK+ toolkit capable of delivering a nice
> office suite, such as Corel Suite 8, StarOffice 5.0, or any other
> commercial-type application?

In my opinion, GTK+-1.0 is reasonably comparable in features to Motif
or, say, what was available in Windows 3.1. The number of bugs that
have been found in GTK+-1.0 has also been quite small. (With the
exception of the Text widget which has admittedly been a bit of a
problem. Hopefully that has been stabilized now.) 

So I would say that it would be completely suitable for writing an
office suite. In some areas, it might be necessary to write a few
new widgets, or construct some new GUI components with DrawingAreas.
However, I believe this would be true for any toolkit.

GTK+-1.2, which will be available in a few months will add some
significant enhancements, such as keyboard navigation of menus
and improved drag and drop.

The one caution that would have to be made is that as of right now,
the documentation available about GTK+ is fairly minimal.  That will
be remedied in time, but developing GTK+ programs right now tends to
involve a bit of looking at the GTK+ header files and example
programs.
 
> Are there any projects underway that is doing an IDE for GTK+/GNOME?

There is a gIDE project. I'm not sure how far along it is. 
That project is writing an IDE in GTK+, but not necessarily
and IDE for writing GTK+ programs. There are also two GUI
builder projects GLE, and Glade, both of which are in 
fairly early states.
 
> Thank you for your time.
> 
> -- 
> -Eric Wood
> MIS Director

Regards,
                                        Owen Taylor