On Dec 10, 2003, at 9:00 PM, Ross Werner wrote: <snip>
So, I turned to the programming language I know second-best--Java. After
playing frustratedly with the source code for Swing demo applets for hours
on end with no results, I gave up. Now I turn to you: what do you people
use to program GUIs? Java Swing? Gtk? Qt? Perl-Tcl/Tk? What would be the
easiest to learn? Are GUIs really as painful to program (especially
without a fancy IDE) as I've heard? Are there resources to help clueless
newbies like myself? Or do I just have to wait until CS Whatever, GUI
programming?
Here is my experience with GUI programming:
Java: Swing is great, especially compared to AWT. :) I coded my Swing apps without the benefit of some kind of GUI Builder, so I imagine that would make it even easier. I haven't used that fancy newfangled SWT, but it looks cool.
QT: I've used it a bit, and it's really nice, but it's C++ (with other language bindings too, I'm sure), which is not my favorite language in the world.
GTK: barely used it at all, mainly because I loathe C, and when I used it ( a long time ago) most of the other language bindings weren't very mature and very poorly documented.
Tk: used TK with both Perl/TK and Python. It's an OK toolkit, but when I used it, visually it left a lot to be desired.
Objective-C and NEXTStep/GNUStep/Cocoa: by far my favorite GUI development environment. On OS X, it's sickening how easy it is to build a GUI app. Interface Builder allows you to build your whole GUI in minutes, including hooking everything together, etc. You can also subclass existing GUI components to customize their behavior (like the NSOpenGLView component, embeds an OpenGL window in your app with Drag & Drop ease. You can do the same with a QuickTime viewer, etc.) Then, it generates all the classes and stubs for you, and you just fill in the code for your methods. It took me a day or two to get up to speed with Objective-C, but once you get the hang of it, you will love it. I used it for all my CS 455 labs, and I wish I had known about it sooner.
So, that is my limited range of experience, which may or may not correspond with others experiences with varying toolkits. To each his own. :) It was a good suggestion to give each toolkit a fair shot. Some of them I did, and some I didn't. ah well.
Grant
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