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Suggest a good widget toolkit to devlop GUI. I've worked with QT, GTK+ and X11, wikipedia shows a lot, is there anything better than than qt? To work with multi touch computing. I cannot start from the scratch with X11, and gtk is tough, QT is easier, but is there anyother toolkits like gtk or frameworks like qt to server better?
I'd suggest you to use the richest possible GUI framework. This way you will eliminate lots of unnecessary code and reuse existing functionalities.
If you'll take above into consideration, you'll have two options (dropping GTK because of complexity as you say, and bunch of other less maintained and less popular toolkits):
Qt
WxWidgets
I've worked with both and both share somewhat similar concepts, but IMHO Qt is better documented, better maintained, and is used by far more developers than WxWidgets, plus it have more sophisticated tools like QtCreator, etc.
On the other hand I like that WxWidgets has manual programming approach, where you're practically forced to build the GUI from code.
One very important thing to mention:
Qt has support for embedded
Linux, eliminating the need for
X11.
Some literature:
WxWidgets Compared To Other Toolkits
...and other Google results
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Can someone suggest what's the best uses for those libraries today? Is it just GUI, or do they have database, XML, networking, threading, etc support too?
I was reading about them, and considered starting to learning/using one of them.
What is the most common one? What's the difference between them? Why would you choose one over the other?
As you seem to primarily target Linux, then the choice mostly depends on the programming language you want to use.
If you code in C, then obviously go for GTK+
If you code in C++, go for Qt, otherwise you will need Gtkmm (a C++ wrapper over GTK+)
If you code in Python, both GTK+ and Qt have bindings for the language: see PyGtk, PyQt and PySide (the one launched by Nokia themselves).
If you code in Java, Qt is no more a viable option imho as Nokia discontinued Qt Jambi (the Java bindings for Qt).
Also, Qt is more top-notch regarding its scenegraph QGraphicsScene API, its scripting engine built over Javascript Core (the engine powering WebKit), its state machine and animations framework, and the declarative UI.
GTK+ doesn't offer that much although you can use Clutter alongside with it.
If you're specifically looking into DB, XML (GTK+ has a parser for a subset of XML) and threading (GTK+ has GLib) features then Qt will offer all that in QtSql, QtXml and QtConcurrent.
All in all, I would say Qt is a sure choice. But GTK+ is very capable as well.
I'm not sure you will get a crystal clear answer for your question, which explains why some people keep preferring Gnome over KDE or vice-versa. Choose what works best for you.
PS: I you plan to also target Symbian, then go for Qt.
EDIT: Something that is also great with Qt is QtWebView: it brings Chromium into your Qt application to display web content. Others are embedding web content into their application using for instance Awesomium or Berkelium.
I've used GTK+, QT and wxWidgets before. Here's a brief summary:
For my first cross platform UI project I decided to go for wxWidgets mainly because at the time the license wasn't as restrictive as QT's (QT was GPL and only for Linux) and it had platform specific UI (unlike GTK). The project worked out well but there were quite a few glitches getting it to compile and run properly in other platforms - sometimes some events were fired up differently and such. Also GDI in wxWidgets was pretty slow.
Next I used GTK for a different project in python. For this I used the python bindings and everything worked out more or less smoothly. I didn't quite like the fact that the UI didn't look native on Windows and Mac and also when you launch a GTK+ app it always debug outputs loads of CRITICAL warnings which seem fine to ignore. :S
Finally, I did a very simple QT project now that Nokia has acquired it and was brilliant. The best of the three. First off, if you're not an old schooler who prefers VI or Emacs, QtCreator is brilliant. I really love VI and used it for years but I much prefer QtCreator for C++ QT projects. Regarding the library I also liked a lot the documentation and the APIs provided. QT has a concept of slots and signals which introduce new C++ keywords and a preprocessor. Basically, after reading a tutorial you'll get it easily and will start to love it. I'm now doing iPhone dev and it does feel a bit like Cocoa's/Interface Builder's UI paradigm.
Summary: I'd go for QT hands down. The license is pretty good and the SDK and documentation really nice.
I have never used GTK, but from my personal experience using Qt:
It is much more than a simple GUI. It's a whole application framework. I used to think of it as the Java libraries for C++. It provides all you mention -- database, XML, networking and threading, and more. It also provides things such as containers and iterators, and counterparts to a number of boost libraries.
The thing that impressed me most when starting to use Qt was the extremely extensive documentation. You get a program called Qt Assistant, which provides fully indexed and searchable API documentation on your desktop, as well as numerous code examples and tutorials. I found it made a big difference in searching the web each time for API info. Very quick access when you need to remember a method signature.
I am not sure which is most common; that's probably hard to measure accurately. They're certainly both popular. As Gnome is the default desktop of Ubuntu, and Gnome sits on top of GTK, it obviously has widespread usage. Of course, KDE is very popular as well. Nokia is heavily pushing Qt in the mobile space -- their Maemo OS, used on the new N900 for example, is soon to switch to Qt as the default toolkit (currently it is GTK.) I believe Qt will also soon become the default toolkit for Symbian OS.
I have not used Qt Creator, but I have heard many good things about it. It is a C++ IDE with obvious heavy integration with Qt. It also has fake vim emulation which is always nice if you like that kind of thing!
Qt uses qmake for build configuration. I found this much nicer than having to write your own makefiles. I do not know what GTK uses for building.
A couple of things I found a bit offputting with Qt at first was its big uses of preprocessor macros. The signal/slots system provides a nice mechanism for event/message passing in your application, but it does feel a bit like magic that may not be easily portable to another toolkit if you ever want to. Also, the moc (meta-object compiler), while I'm not entirely sure what it does, also feels a bit too much like magic going on behind the scenes.
All in all, though, I would recommend Qt, particularly if you are learning. It has really amazing documentation and a nice IDE, and busy forums. You'll be able to build C++ apps very rapidly with it, particularly with the QML coming in 4.7.
It probably depends on what you want to do. I would recommend Qt, because it's more than GUI, it has nice Python bindings (so does Gtk), and GUI libraries themselves are (subjectively speaking) more pleasant then Gtk.
Gtk is on the other hand more common in linux world, so you can probably get more help on the web. Reason for widespread of Gtk probably has more to do with Gnome and Ubuntu, rather then technical merits, but if you want you software to blend nicely with those two, you'll achieve that more easily with Gtk.
Qt for one sure has solid DB, network, threading support etc... It does a lot more then just cross-platform GUI (and it does most of it quite well).
I'd recommend it over GTK+.
Qt. It's not only object oriented, is "good" object oriented.
It's based on a "subset" of C++ that doesn't rely on the obscurity of C++ (but you are allowed to stick with them, if you fancy masochism ;) ).
It has a strong momentum now that Nokia bought it (actually Nokia did ~2/3 years ago). It's going to be in all Nokia AND Intel mobile devices (smartphones, netbooks, tablets).
It's the backbone of KDE, so it's very mature, but it's designed in a very flexible way, that makes it possible to support TODAY all the latest "cool stuff" that a more-then-just-GUI framework should have.
Go for it.
Just adding QT advantages to other answers.. QT has great documentation, its own IDE & GUI creator and enhances C++ with some new concepts like slots/signals (basically events).
I am not a GTK developer, so I can't compare those to the GTK world :(
It also looks like Nokia is about to use Qt everywhere, like on Maemo
If you want your app to run on iOS, Android, Blackberry, other mobile platforms, Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux, use Qt.
qt-project.org
I have started using Python for web development recently, it's kinda cool;
I have seen programs that are developed in QT/C++, which is good enough in terms of esthetics;
I have just noticed the new PySide project (which brings LGPL Qt license to Python and it doesn't support Windows yet).
In view of the above, I see the possibility of using Python + PyQt/PySide to develop cross platform apps in the future :) but I have several doubts right now:
Can PyQty/PySide be used to develop really complex/modern UI? Can somebody give me some points to have a look at some nice-looking screenshots of apps that are developed in Python+QT?
What about the performance of using Python + QT for a desktop app?
Thanks in advance!
Can PyQty/PySide be used to develop really complex/modern UI?
Desktop applications come in all sorts of varieties -- some nicely laid out, some extremely customized with virtually no semblance to a standard application for that OS. The same can be done with Qt/PyQt/PySide. As Alex said, there should be no visible difference between an application written with PyQt/PySide versus one written with Qt in C++. Any program written with Qt4 (using bindings or not) will, by default, look like a standard modern application.
Of course, there are features of recent Windows releases (and likely some on Mac OS X) that aren't supported immediately and by default in Qt, but you can almost always write some custom platform specific code for those situations where said features are truly important.
Can somebody give me some points to have a look at some nice-looking screenshots of apps that are developed in Python+QT?
The best and most open source program that I know of and which is written with PyQt, is Eric -- a Python based IDE.
What about the performance of using Python + QT for a desktop app?
For most applications the performance difference between a C++ Qt application and a PyQt application are not noticible. But if you really need performance, you can write certain parts of the application in C++ and make bindings available in Python so you can integrate the two.
TortoiseHg was re-designed using Qt and PyQt for its 2.0 release.
Here is one of several posted screenshots:
There is no aesthetic difference between the look and feel of C++ based Qt, and the PyQt and PySide wrappers on top of it. I use basically no desktop GUI apps so I couldn't point you to any implemented with any of these language/toolkit combos, but if you like the former, you'll be hard put to distinguish it in any way from the latter.
A bit late but for the record, apps such as Skype, GoogleEarth or the recent versions of VLC (media player & more) used the Qt libs.
There are many dynamic languages that target Sun's JVM (Groovy, Scala, Jython, Jruby etc) and I was sure there are many that target Adobe's AVM as well. But I was surprised to find only Haxe do something similiar. related question on this site
I think the eclipse e4 SWT project doesn't compile to ABC (ActionScript Byte Code) directly, but first converts Java to AS3 and then the Flex compilter does the rest.
Could it be that no one yet wrote a simple Java / Python / Scala AVM2 compiler that can be used as an alternative to the proprietary Adobe Flash Builder (formerly Flex Builder)?
I don't mind paying Adobe for a fine producy, but writing Java in Eclipse is so much faster and convinent than the half baked Adobe plugin suite. are there really no efforts other than Haxe?
Here you go: Compiling Java and C# to SWF
I don't mind paying Adobe for a fine
producy, but writing Java in eclipse
is so much faster and convinent than
the half baked adobe plugin suite.
mxmlc (the Flex compiler) is free and open source and available as part of the Flex SDK. It compiles actionscript 3 to swf. If you want an IDE with the same level of support as writing Java in Eclipse then you will want FDT which unfortunately isn't free but is far superior to Adobe's Flex/Flash Builder. You could also use Flash Develop which is a very capable and free IDE for flash development.
AS3 is a nice language in it's own right and can compare favorably to Java (although some newer Java features like generics are sadly missing). So learning it wouldn't be "re-inventing the wheel" so much as adding another bow to your development skills quiver.
But if you are insistent on wanting to write Java code and produce swf files then I think that Joa's work that James linked to above is your best bet. I'm not sure if he has released all the parts publicly yet though...
I found out that adobe started to do something similar (but for C++): http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/
Also this one (C# compiler) but it seems to be obsolete:
http://blog.bluetubeinteractive.com/2005/05/c_to_swf_compil.html
And there is an apparently abandoned Java Implementation: http://osflash.org/j2as
But I'm still looking for a working Java to AVM2 implementation...
Anyone? :)
Is it realistic to try and learn and code a Flex 3 application without purchasing FlexBuilder? Since the SDK and BlazeDS are open source, it seems technically possible to develop without Flex Builder, but how realistic is it.
I would like to test out Flex but don't want to get into a situation where I am dependent on the purchase of FlexBuilder (at least not until I am confident and competent enough with the technology to recommend purchase to my employer).
I am experimenting right now, so I'm taking a long time and the trial license on my Windows machine has expired. Also Linux is my primary development platform and there is only an alpha available for Linux.
Most of the documentation I've found seem to use Flex Builder.
Maybe I should use Laszlo...
IntelliJ IDEA works as a Flex IDE, if you happen to also be a Java developer. It's free if you contribute to open source projects.
Check out FlashDevelop for Windows. I like it better than Flex Builder.
I've been using Flex since version 2 and Flex3/BlazeDS since it came out of beta. I also have some experience with Lazzlo and the difference is day and night (Flex rocks!). I have not regretted once using Flex. Regarding FlexBuilder, it is worth every penny. While it is completely possible and reasonable to write Flex application without FlexBuilder, the productivity gains of using it will more than recoup the investment. Try the evaluation for 30 days and compare it to some of the other options suggested about (I'm going to try FlashDevelop).
Some things you get with FlexBuilder include:
Code completion
Visual editor
Debugger (it is fantastic!!)
Profiler (also very good)
Regarding Linux, the alpha version of FlexBuilder does not have a visual editor. Other than that, I understand it is reasonably feature complete, still free, and many of the Adobe employees I've talked with that use Linux are happy with it.
FlashDevelop is really easy to setup with the Flex SDK. Just download FlashDevelop, then download the Flex SDK. In FlashDevelop go to Tools > Program Options > AS3Context (under Plugins) > Set the "Flex SDK Location" to the root of the folder you extracted the SDK to and build away. FlashDevelop even has a basic MXML project that will get you going.
If you use ColdFusion for the backend, having FlexBuilder in Eclipse and CFEclipse can mean one less IDE to have to get familiar with.
I'm going to join the choir here and say FlashDevelop for an alternative. The only reasons you might want FlexBuilder are:
Flex charts
Step-through debugging.
Profiler (I haven't used it)
Visual style editor
However, the code-completion and general bloody-awesomeness of FlashDevelop's code-completion and syntax highlighting knocks the gimpy eclipse crap out of the water. So, pretty much what Todd said, except for the code-completion part. Flex Builder is very flakey in that department.
Short answer: Yes
I'm working on a team of developers and designers. We code our .MXML and .AS in FlashDevelop 3 and our designer creates .FLA with skins and widgets that get [Import()]ed in ActionScript.
I wrote a little more about this subject here:
Flash designer/coder collaboration best practices
I have been using FlashDevelop for along time (4/5 years), I am actively using it to develop Flex4.5 applications, it has built in support for code completion, it has a profiler and a debugger that work excellently. The IDE itself is responsive and require the .Net framework, in fact here, I'll list some stuff.
FlashDevelop Pros
Free IDE
Code completion feature
Very capable Debugger
Profiler
Documenting
Ability to build Air / Flex files
Templating
Plugins
FlashDevelop Cons
Lack of UI desing support
.Net support only (Won't work with Mono)
Everything else is pretty simple to get running with, the instructions are available at http://www.flashdevelop.org/
Absolutely. I've been a Flex developer since Flex 2 and until recently I've used my regular editor, TextMate, for coding and Ant for building. TextMate has some good extensions for ActionScript and Flex coding, but I think you could get that for any decent editor.
What's been missing from my setup is a usable debugger, the command line version is a pain to work with. Because of that I've been starting to use FlexBuilder on the side, using it in parallel with my regular setup.
Having a profiler doesn't hurt too.
I've been using FlexBuilder for awhile now and just started to switch to using Eclipse with Flex SDK. I work for a non-profit so the word FREE is huge.
Initially, it is fairly intimidating so if you have the money, you might want FlexBuilder.
There is a lot you need to know and do if you use the SDK. The learning and experience may pay off though... I am still undecided myself.
I second FlashDevelop. You don't get the visual design stuff for the MXML, but for the code (both MXML and AS) it's excellent.
I also use FlashDevelop when working on AS3 projects. For me, the ugliness (UI design) and sluggishness of Eclipse/Flex Builder is enough of a deterrent to stay away from Flex Builder.
In addition to the weaknesses of FlashDevelop pointed out previously, one of my biggest gripes is that it is not a true .NET only app and therefore will never work in mono and therefore can not be easily ported to the mac - which is my platform of choice for development web/javascript/AS3 development.
Amethyst is also a pretty good option to try. It is a plugin for MS Visual Studio, and takes advantage of a lot of the goodies there. It is significantly less sluggish than FlashBuilder, has a really good debugger, and a decent visual designer as well.
The personal version is free, but quite crippled. You have to buy the pro version after a 60 day free trial. However, it is (at time of writing) almost 1/3 the cost of Flash Builder.
As an added bonus you don't need to pay for Visual Studio since it works with the free (albeit hard to find) "shell version (integrated)" of Visual Studio. It won't work with any of the free Express editions, though.