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Does anyone know of any semi-portable way to write console applications (e.g. basic animation) in scheme? I heard of an ncurses wrapper but I couldn't find anything.
You can't do any GUI in a portable way in Scheme -- because you only get very basic file IO.
Depends on your scheme of choice. Chicken Scheme, for instance, has good ties with C and has various Curses libraries. See their code examples:
ncurses
mojo, curses for the lazy :)
Have you checked out Guile? I've never used it myself except just to play around, but it is pretty cool, and even has a little GUI support. Not sure about portability, except it should port just fine between different Unix systems, but the same can be said about ncurses.
Don't give up hope! If you're dedicated to developing in Scheme, you can.
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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
Put shortly: For those familiar with language bindings in Qt and Gtk+. E.g. python and ruby. Are there any quality or capability difference?
More background: I know C++ and Qt very well. Minimal experience with Gtk+. I know C++ is not ideal for language bindings due to the lack of a well defined ABI (application binary interface). I also read that Gtk+ was designed to be bound to other languages. So I wonder how this manifets itself in practice. Are the Gtk+ bindings better maintained or work better in some way than their Qt counterparts?
I am presently quite interested in the Go language, and they have started developing Gtk+ bindings. However C++ bindings is far away. It makes me wonder whether learning Gtk+ is worth it.
I've used GTK and Qt in C++ and also PyGTK and PyQt in Python quite extensively.
Qt beats GTK hands down - its a much more flexible, modern and clean API. GTK is also lacking some features that are important to me. From a framework point of view, I'd recommend Qt.
As for langauge bindings (I can only speak about Python, since I've never used the Ruby equivalents), I think PyGTK (using Glade and a wrapper like Padraig Bradys libglade) make GUI programming insanely easy and fun. However, if you can GPL your software (or pay the license fee), then PyQt is also a good option, and while not quite as friendly as PyGTK + Glade (in that with GTK you can define your UI in Glade as a separate XML file, so you can tweak the UI without touching code; in Qt if you want to use QtDesigner, you have to generate code using uic, if I remember correctly) the API itself is really really nice to use and mirrors the Qt frameworks clean design very closely.
Over all, I'd probably recommend using PyQt over PyGTK, but I may be biased since I much prefer Qt over GTK nowadays, though you could try both out and see which you prefer - they are both almost trivial to get working.
If you are looking for a great book on PyQt, I'd recomment Rapid GUI Programming qith Python and Qt.
To summarize: IMHO Qt beats GTK in both quality and capability. Both PyGTK and PyQt are of excellent quality and capability mirrors the underlying framework, though PyGTK can load Glade xml files.
I think that GTK bindings are older than Qt ones (and so a bit more mature) but they are both usable and your previous knowledge of Qt should be the main factor in your choice.
I developed small GUIs using both Qt and GTK with their python bindings and found the two equivalent. Some regrets though on the PyQt bindings with Qt container (QVector, ...) that are not translated into regular python data structure and thus add a bit of complexity to the code. I didn't recall the same issues using PyGTK.
I have worked with both PyQt and PyGTK and I would say they're both regularly mantained and synched with their parent frameworks. However, and this is completely subjective, I found more rewarding working with PyGTK than with PyQt, even if I hadn't previously written any code using GTK. If you know well Qt, go with Qt though.
I have been trying a few combinations around Qt : RubyQt, JRuby + Jambi, PyQt. The first one quickly ends up in various segmentation-faults. My Qt skills may be the problem but all in all the seg faults are not quite readable. The forum for RubyQt is nearly dead so don't expect to find much information there.
So I moved to JRuby + Jambi. This worked until well, I reached some missing functions here and there. Plus I had to implement a proper signal/connect for JRuby. So, more or less a hack. Not convincing.
Finally I moved to Python (wich I don't like very much). But woooh, what a difference. Bindings are up to date, I have still to ecnounter a segmetatio fault, error messages are most of the time very explanatory. So as far as I'm concerned Python+Qt is a clear winner.
Please note that I was trying these combinations in order to find a proper language/qt binding so that I can create a production ready with my commutation hours (roughly 2 hours a day). So my tolerance to small-but-annoying problems such as segmentation faults is 0. I also have to develop on Windows and Linux. So Windows installation is necessary (and once again, Python is a clear winner here).
there are C++ gtk+ bindings. Google for gtkmm.
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.
I would like to experiment with ideas about distributed file synchronization/replication. To make it efficient when the user is working, I would like to implement some kind of daemon to monitor changes in some directory (e.g. /home/user/dirToBeMonitored or c:\docs and setts\user\dirToBeMonitored). So, I could be able to know which filename was added/changed/deleted at every time (or within a reasonable interval).
Is this possible with any high-medium level language?. Do you know some API (and in which language?) to do this?
Thanks.
The APIs are totally different for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and any other Unix you can name, it seems. I don't know of any cross-platform library that handles this in a consistent way.
A bonified answer, albeit one that requires a largish library dependency (well-worth it IMO)!
QT provides the QFileSystemwatcher class, which uses the native mechanism of the underlying platform.
Even better, you can use the QT language bindings for Python or Ruby. Here is a simple PyQT4 application which uses QFileSystemWatcher.
Notes
A good reference on on creating deployable PyQT4 apps, especially on OSX but should work for Windows also.
Same solution previously posted here.
Other cross-platform toolkits may also do the trick (for example Gnome's GIO has GFileMonitor, although it is UNIX only and doesn't support OSX's FSEvents mechanism afaik).
In Linux it is called inotify.
And on OS X it's called fsevents. It's an OS-level API, so it's easiest to access from C or C++. It should be accessible from nearly any language, although bindings for your preferred language may not have been written yet.