Re: [gtkmm] Qt converts?

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Staff <staff transportationimpact com> writes:

[...]

I'm not a convertit, but I think I can answer some of these questions
anyway.

> 3) Will it be a huge learning curve to switch?  Especially with a lot of 
> graphics classes (I'm assuming that Canvas would be equivalent to
> QPainter).

The GnomeCanvas is easy to use, in my experience. But I've mostly used
it for drawing (for games and for graphs) - I don't know how difficult
mouse-interactive applications are.

> 4) Are the openGL classes working well?  We envision switching a lot of the 
> drawing to openGL in the near future.

I've only heard good about them.

> 5) What IDE or Dialog editors are people using?  While many rave about 
> KDevelop, I actually find that vers 3 is still pretty buggy.

Personally, I'm using Emacs. For constructing the GUI you will want to
use Glade to produce an XML file. Then you use libglademm to load the
XML file and construct the GUI data structures (this is all done
automatically).

Once you've got the first window up, it's very easy. It is also much,
much less obtrusive than the way e.g. MS Visual Studio works where you
get your code cluttered with the auto-generated GUI code.

Glade let you use any IDE you want. That said, there the GNOME IDE
Anjuta which tries to do some integration, I think. I don't know -
Emacs is so much better at code editing that I wouldn't ever switch. :-)


> 6) How easy is it to cross-compile with MinGW?

Don't know about this one either - but many people here are using
gtkmm with Windows, so someone must know.

> 7) It appears that Inkscape is using Gtkmm but that many of the other C++ 
> Gnome apps (ie Abiword) don't - why not?

I don't really know, but perhaps because gtkmm has been evolving a
lot. There also was a major cleanup from gtkmm 1.2 to gtkmm2. But it
is very stable now.

I'm pretty sure that they would be able to cut away half of their GUI
code if they switched to gtkmm, although if you are using Glade +
libglade for the GUI instead of coding it by hard, then the difference
between GTK+ and gtkmm isn't as important.

Perhaps it is just reluctance to use yet another library on top of the
stack. I started a couple of projects with pure GTK+ myself, but only
ever got half-way. It got too cluttered to be fun anymore. Then I
switched to gtkmm and has since completed two projects with a couple
more on their way. :-)

> 8) What would be the major advantage of Gtkmm over WxWindows?  

I've never used WxWindows, but I've never seen a good WxWindows
program. They look ugly and feel clunky, somehow. But that's just my
experience. If you are using gtkmm, you get direct access to a
modern GUI library.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/