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I agree, that's out of question. A word about Borland, nevertheless:
they offer cross platform development (at least between Linux and
Windows), I don't know to what extent, and we developed some small
applications using C++ Builder under Linux without Wine. It's not the
best option, though: some of the most interesting features are not free
and have (an expensive) price, the environment itself is not open
source, it's fairly difficult to make any other library around work,
because it has its own compiler. But there's no single open source
project that comes even closer to C++ Builder (Kylix). Leandro Fanzone Dave wrote: This may be a little off topic for a technical mailing list, but I think it is relavent because the subject came up and because all of the people involved with the direction of gtkmm presumably read this list. Like Dr. Phillips, I'm looking into cross-platform GUI toolkits right now, and also like Dr. Phillips, I'm concerned about the development tools available not only for gtkmm, but all of the toolkits I've looked at. I've looked at GTK+, gtkmm, wxWindows, Qt and FLTK and frankly, the GUI building tools for all of them stink, IMHO. The reason they "stink" really comes down to one thing: None of them really combine RAD with an IDE. For gtkmm or any of the others to become a dominant toolkit, I think it is important for it to be supported by a good C++ RAD IDE, because that would greatly reduce the learning curve needed to build non-trival applications using gtkmm and would break-down the initial acceptance barrier for people like me who are new to these frameworks. Munging together Glade, gtkmm, libglademm (along with all of their dependencies) to design the GUI along with vi and emacs or whatever to actually write the code and then creating a makefile or whatever to build and test is pretty daunting even for developers with a lot of experience with other tools and is *not* the answer in my opinion. What I and apparently the majority or developers have found most productive for putting easily maintained GUI oriented applications together are IDE's that let you design the GUI, manage the code, compile and run it all in one environment. For the C++ world, the best IMHO was a product from Watcom/Powersoft/Sybase called "Power++" (originally "Optima++"). I thought the environment was excellent because the class library used standard C++ that all of the standard-orientated C++ developers and compilers of the day would understand directly (one of the main reasons I lean towards gtkmm over Qt) and because it integrated everything well. In the Win32 world, I no longer use C++ directly for GUI development and the simple reasons why are because Power++ is gone and there aren't any other good RAD IDE tools for standard C++ other than perhaps a product from Borland (The major problems there are the compiler and that the Borland framework uses all kinds of work-arounds to allow Borland to "bootstrap" the framework from their pascal product). And of course, they are not cross-platform, at least without something like wine. Anyway, the reason all this ties in nicely with gtkmm: Of all of the cross-platform GUI toolkits I've looked at, so far gtkmm seems to offer the best all-around kit lending itself to building a RAD IDE around using standard C++. In my book the development environment(s) offered for a toolkit are as important as the toolkit (assuming the toolkit actually works). What I think a lot of developers would like to see is a development tool where you could: 1) start a project 2) add a standard dialog (*) 3) start dropping widgets on it "visually" (**) 4) produce the event handling stubs through the IDE 5) fill in the event stubs with custom code through built-in code editing 6) build/run the project (***) 7) Repeat 2 - 6 ad infinitum * The IDE would add the header and code files also when a dialog was added ** The IDE would construct (in the code files) the widgets added to a dialog *** The IDE would support multiple compilers using a command-line build scheme, not one requiring makefiles which rely on some external (other than the compiler) build tools. In other words, a language and library centric (as opposed to compiler centric) RAD IDE that could be used throughout the entire lifecycle to build a large GUI project in it's entirety, with standard C++. I'm not alone in my opinion about a good IDE - take a look at http://www.fltk.org/poll.php?r15 for example. I know *just* the above would take quite an effort, not to mention adding a good debugger, class browser and all of that in version 2 or 3... or 7 or whatever, but IMHO the most important thing is the "wow" factor, productivity and reduced learning curve that such a tool would provide for a toolkit. In order to get cross-platform GUI development to take off, I think it is vital to provide good tools along with the toolkits. My newbie $0.02 worth..-----Original Message----- From: gtkmm-list-admin gnome org [mailto:gtkmm-list-admin gnome org]On Behalf Of Andreas Rottmann Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2003 8:46 AM To: Ruediger Sonderfeld Cc: gtkmm-list gnome org Subject: [gtkmm] Re: Gtkmm or Qt? Ruediger Sonderfeld <cplusplushelp gmx net> writes: [Line-wrapping dajusted, please fix MUA]On 0, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote: |