help me catch up on GTK gui tools

["Brett Stottlemyer" <stottle qadas com>]

All, 

 

Please give me a hand - I believe there is a loop around here somewhere, and
I am out of it.

 

I don't want to take too much of your time, but I think a little bit of
background will help you understand what I am looking for.

 

I've written a bunch of number crunching C++ code and want to create some
UIs to visualize and interact with the data.  I want to use OpenGL for this
but I also need buttons to help with data interaction.  This will be for the
Solaris platform, but the machines at work are not connected to the
internet, so I need to get the sysadmins to bring in tarballs - which I
don't want to do too many times.

 

So to get started and figure out what I want to use, I'm testing out tools
at home using Solaris 2.10 installed within VMWare Server on a PC (I never
could get MINGW/MSYS/GTK to work on the PC, plus that wasn't the end system
anyway).  I know the general advice is to install the binary packages, but I
don't have much sysadmin experience and this is on a fresh Solaris 10
install (on my PC) - I figured if I couldn't compile the libraries I'd have
trouble with any tools using the libraries (this also goes back to the PC
trouble I had).  So I've spent more than a few days getting gtk 2.10.1 and
all dependencies compiled.  My not properly conceived notion was to then get
gtkglext/glade and the corresponding mm versions and start testing
development.  Now that I have 2.10.1 compiled, there is no gtkmm 2.10 (2.6
is the latest stable) and there is a choice with glade v2 (for gtk 2.8) and
the in-development glade v3.  I also saw a hint that gtkbuilder (in
development?) is preferred over glade also.  And I'm not sure which versions
are compatible with gtkglext.  

 

Better is the enemy of Good Enough.  I can keep searching for a perfect
solution and wait a long time, or pick something and start developing -
which is where being out of the loop hurts.  Could those of you that know
where GTK is going please help me pick one of the following, or a better
path?  

 

1)       Older, stable versions of gtk/gtkglext/glade/mm's (binary package
versions)

a.       Pro - stable, easy to install

b.       Con - Difficult to upgrade?  Doesn't have newer features.

2)       Stable GTK with Glade v2

a.       Pro - newer version of GTK

b.       Con - older version of Glade, does it support newer GTK features?

3)       Stable GTK with Glade v3

a.       Pro - newer GTK

b.       Con - Unstable Glade

4)       Unstable GTK with GTKBuilder - available in GTK 2.12 betas?

a.       Pro - most future proof?  Part of GTK, so no need to wait for
dependency updates (big benefit)?

b.       Con - Unstable

 

The last three don't address gtkglext, nor the mm part of this but help on
these would at least get me going in the right direction.

 

I'm sure the different developers have different ideas - I actually would
appreciate different views.  As someone new to this community and presented
with so many options (I'm not considering QT/wxWidgets/FLTK but still have
multiple choices with GTK), any discussion (or pointers to recent
discussion) would likely benefit me as well as many others.  I'm basing this
last comment on this article - http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/928.

 

Thanks in advance,

Brett