I would like to build a graphical application that must work on at least Windows, Linux and MacOS. I would like to know what do you suggest I should use.
I have some experience with Java and C++ but I thought about using Java Swing first. What do you think or further suggest (like maybe tools or frameworks)? I also may be needing to connect to a PostgreSQL database to store data.
Java is probably the simplest way to get your application working on all 3 platforms as well as to add database support. All of these are equally possible in C++, but it definitely involves more work because you need to learn to use a cross-platform widget toolkit. Also, C++ database drivers usually have wildly varying designs but Java presents a unified interface via JDBC - this also means that you can change your underlying DB at any time without having to change your code.
I would use the Qt platform from Nokia. It supports all the OSes that you've mentioned and has also database connectors for PostgreSQL but also for MySQL, SQLite, etc.
It also has a very nice IDE, the QT Creator that you can use should you pick Qt.
I would suggest Qt too. Qt has seen very good development recently, their examples and documentation base is quite large, and the LGPL license is flexible too, for creating proprietary software. It has a good Qt Creator IDE, a Qt GUI Designer. Plus is has quite a number of modules, enabling it to be used in conjunction with other language developed apps/libraries. And, it is used in commercial/public apps like Google Earth, Skype (maybe only the linux version). So, it has a good history of reliability. And yeah, for Database, it has modules, like Qt-Sql. Another advantage you get over java is speed.
wxWidgets does cross-platform easily enough, using available native toolkits. You could probably use a ORM for the database part, but I don't have enough experience using them under C++ to provide an actual informed opinion there.
GTK is cross-platform. Pidgin uses it and manages to get away with being generally considered a fully-cross-platform app. The installer size is a problem, though.
Related
I read about wxRuby and Shoes but never used them. I want to learn ruby by developing a real-world serious Windows application. Among the available frameworks, which one is widely used and acceptable, rich in libraries and comes bundled with .exe builder?
There aren't a great deal of sensible choices for client/desktop applications in Ruby right now, however I believe one of your best options is to take advantage of mature JVM libraries via JRuby.
The Redcar text editor is written in Ruby and runs on the JVM, and you can view the source on Github here https://github.com/danlucraft/redcar
There is also a development company called Atomic Object that made a neat Ruby desktop app using JRuby with a fairly sophisticated GUI and you can view that here.
I've been thinking about the exact same problem as you and keeping and eye on my the options, these last few months :-)
I've also been using JRuby on the server-side and it's solid and reliable.
Finally, if it's Windows-only as you say, then you could consider using a .NET GUI Framework like WPF and build it using IronRuby, however IronRuby is not yet as mature as JRuby, so you could be exposing yourself to some risk there in terms of compatibility, bugs and performance (and for the record, I like IronRuby!).
However, the potential issues of using IronRuby might be balanced out by the gains you'd make using a GUI framework that's designed and optimised for Windows and is nicer than Swing. WPF is about as rich as it gets for GUI frameworks on Windows.
There are bindings for Qt on GitHub. I believe it's a fork from the Korundum bindings from KDE. However, I haven't tried it on Windows yet.
You might consider using RubyTk. Tk is a toolkit that works with many languages including ruby. For more information see tkdocs.com
disclaimer: I have no idea how widely used it is, though Tk in general is used in many places for both commercial, internal and open source projects.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_Programming/GUI_Toolkit_Modules will help
In terms of popularity, in 2008 shooes was most popular, but that has probably dropped.
http://www.pressure.to/ruby_gui_survey/
Since RubyInstaller project bundles now complete modern Tk distribution and bindings eliminating Windows installation woes- Tk seems the way to go.
With RubyGems I believe it is now possible to install GTK+ for this. So says this in Gems. This is a widely used framework, both in open source and industry. It is used in GIMP and, I think, presents a good windows system that is close to native and easily useable.
We are selling an image processing application (about 120k lines of code) developed with wxWidgets. We planned everything to be as most cross platform as possible in case the porting from Windows to other OS was needed. And in fact we are going to realiza a version for Mac.
We haven't tested wxWidgest on Mac yet, but we haven't read very good things about it.
In general, do you think is it worth to port from wxWidgets to QT? Do you believe it will be an hard and long job?
Is QT for Mac much better than wxWidgets implementation?
Is QT much more productive that wxWidgets?
I would like to add that we would'n like to keep code bases for gui, so the choice is just wxWidgets vs QT.
Test your application on Mac, and then decide. If there are only a few wrinkles to iron out, why put in all that extra work to switch toolkits?
It will be a long hard job. Without knowing more about your application and situation, it is hard to say whether making the switch is worth the effort. I do know that I would rather work on a Qt app than a wx app.
I have a friend who recently switched a significant wx application to Qt, and he is quite happy with the change. Mac support is one of his (boss's) important features, but I think wx's support for Mac was adequate, if not stellar.
My experience has been that Qt is definitely more productive than wx.
It is worth noting that wxWidgets on the Mac is transitioning to Cocoa. This should be done for wxWidgets 3.0, but is testable with the development release wxWidgets 2.9 now. Is Qt Cocoa or Carbon based?
We have an application that runs under Windows and the Mac, built using wxWidgets. The application performs very well on both platforms.
I recommend switching over to Qt. wxWidgets is a GUI toolkit, whereas Qt is an application framework with much, much more features.
I can't say anything about their mac implementations, but i can clearly say that i am far more productive using Qt. When i was using wxWidgets, i was a student and then when i got a job, i started using Qt.
wxWidgets gave me a feeling of incompleteness, but as i said, this may be caused by the fact that i was an inexperienced student but nonetheless, i think Qt is way better.
Until you have investigated more and have a good reason(s) to switch toolkits, then absolutely not.
We are using wxWidgets for Linux & the like, Mac, and Windows. It's a great toolkit and certainly much more than just a GUI.
Like dtw and NuSkooler, we are using wxWidgets on Mac (carbon/cocoa), Linux (32/64), Windows (32/64) and all works fine. In wx, we use gui, filesystem, threads, html libs.
+1 for Qt
I have used both wxWidgets and Qt extensively on different projects for the Windows platform writing C++ applications.
Having used both and compared the two after, I would absolutely use Qt over wxWidgets. You need to consider (as some of the others have pointed out) if the re-factoring effort is is something you have time for and are willing to do.
Also consider the cost -- this may not matter in your situation, but unlike wxWidgets, the Qt Library is not free for commercial use. I have spoken to TrollTech at length and read through their licensing agreement to verify this; you definitely have to pay unless you GPL your application.
Regarding licensing see:
http://qt.nokia.com/about/licensing/frequently-asked-questions
"Will you continue to offer Qt under a
commercial license?"
"Yes, absolutely. Our commercial
licensing will continue."
"Why would I want to buy a commercial
license? What is the difference?"
"The commercial Qt license includes
email support, access to upgrades and
allows you to develop fully closed
source software. The LGPL carries some
restrictions regarding the ability for
users to relink libraries and other
restrictions that may impose
architectural requirements that some
organizations might not be comfortable
with."
Qt is definitely worth the money though, even if you are not doing cross-platform development. It has a lot more and better documentation. Qt and wxWidgets are not perfect... The fact that they are bloated and provide APIs for networking, data structures, and database handling is not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes sticking with the STL or Boost libraries (if you're coding in C++) is a much better solution.
Good luck.
-bn
+1 for wxWidgets. A big project of mine used wxWidgets and found it a nice framework to use, and an easy enough framework to get your head around to modify if you need to (to support Mac specific features).
Try it: you could be 80% there when you first generate the binary.
I am working on a new small utility desktop application but I am not really able to choose the GUI framework to use. I have worked on both JAVA,C# and C++, so language is not really a constraint. My criteria are:-
A very well designed architecture, something like QT. It's better if it follows typical C++ design methodologies.
Layout management should be easy, intuitive and not really cumbersome. I hate adjusting pixels on screen.
Its license should be open.
It should look good :)
Mentioned QT seems to comply to all your requirements. QT has "deploy everywhere" attribute, whilst Java needs no deploying at all (it depends on what is use of your utility).
Ad. 2 QT has really convenient GUI designer.
Ad. 3 LGPL. Usually it is enough.
Ad. 4 It is always matter of taste. IMO QT4 looks awesome under linux, but it's windows look'n'feel is correct at best. It's strong point is, that without additional tweaks it almost everywhere looks native.
I've been using Swing, and it works fine. NetBeans (a decent IDE by itself) even supports graphical GUI building.
It's well designed (basically
everything is done with listeners,
functions that are registered for a
certain event). It has bindings, so
you don't have to write code to set
up a value in a text field or read
it out
Layout is not perfect, but
acceptable within NetBeans. It's
WYSIWYG (almost). Look-and-feel can
be changed on the fly.
License is free. Source-code is not
available, I think.
Looks fine on Windows and Linux,
less so on OSX.
You could always try SWT. The advantages of Java with the standard L&F of supported operating systems.
Well designed. Lots of
documentation, and very easy to
develop with. (If you know Swing,
you can pick up SWT in no time.)
I believe layout managers do exist
that support SWT. I'm not positive
about this though, as I typically
don't use layout managers too much.
Uses the Eclipse Public
License. Should meet most of
your requirements.
From Wikipedia on SWT:
SWT is written in Java. To display GUI elements, the SWT implementation accesses the native GUI libraries of the operating system using JNI (Java Native Interface) in a manner that is similar to those programs written using operating system-specific APIs. Programs that call SWT are portable, but the implementation of the toolkit, despite the fact that it is written in Java, is unique for each platform.
Hope that helps you.
I'd suggest wxWidgets if you want to program in C++ or wxPython (the python language binding of wxWidgets if you know or don't mind learning Python.
Architecture is similar to QT I think.
Layout using sizers. Quite easy once you get the hang of it.
Liberal open source license.
Widgets are native on all platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux).
How do you port a Cocoa/Mac application to Windows? I mean how would you go about it? Assume the app was written with Objective-C and Cocoa, there's nothing fancy going on, no "engine" that could be factored out, etc.
Rewrite from scratch? I don't think there will be huge overlaps between the Mac and Windows codebases, right?
I have doubts about cocotron.
Its not clear from the cocotron website that cocotron is actually production ready yet. Id suspect that it would be possible to start new app development and use cocotron constantly to maintain and test windows builds on the go.
But to retrofit it into an existing project might be a much larger task. There are also no alternatives to cocotron - other than perhaps gnustep.
The practical approach to cross platform development involves developing the non gui components of your application, once, in C or C++. And then using a cross platform GUI library like QT - which is VERY good at generating and using native UI where possible or faking it where not. Please DO go to qt.nokia.com and download the latest build of QTCreator for windows and mac - See how the same QT application looks and feels very convincingly native on both platforms.
If QT doesn't provide a native enough solution, then you need to develop your GUI twice :- once in Cocoa, and once in Win32. The cocoa GUI would be in objective C of course, the Win32 GUI in C/C++.
Your non gui application code would - written in c++ - not be able to call Objective-C directly, but its not hard to write shim classes, implemented in .mm files - the provide a c++ interface, and wrap access to an objective c object or class.
You are also going to have to come up with an alternative to CoreData on windows - perhaps sqlite? Given that XCode has integrated support for the sqlite framework, and testing multiple code paths is, well, more work - perhaps dropping CoreData in favor of a common layer is a better approach?
The problem with Objective C is its very poor support on any platform that is not OS X. You can attempt to use the Cocotron, but I wouldn't consider it production ready yet.
For portability, a re-write is in order. With judicious use of standard C or C++ for the "core" of the application, you could still implement platform specific GUI code. If you don't like maintaining two GUIs, you can also try a toolkit such as Qt
Depending on which objects and framework you are using for your cocoa app, you might be able to get away with using gnustep, although the end result will probably look very weird to windows users, and the development environment might be a bit difficult to setup at first.
Are you aware of Cocotron? It looks like the project may have gone stale, but it's a good starting point anyway. It's a project to port Core APIs.
If your application is not cleanly separated (ie: a la MVC) then the only solution is a rewrite, I think.
I work in the embedded world, using mainly C and no GUI at all (because there is no display screen).
Moving over to the non-embedded world, in which I have nearly no experience, what is the best programming environment (langauge/IDE/etc) for me to build a simple window-form application that will run on all the common platforms: windows/linux/mac-os ?
I do not want to build a web-app.
I have my eye on Python and one of it's widget libraries, QT or WxWidgets. Is that a good option ?
I like GTK+ personally but that or any of the ones you mentioned should be OK. I don't know which is the best in terms of least RAM usage.
Both wx and QT have embedded/universal versions where the widgets are drawn directly.
They can both be called from python,but if you have a very small system python or py2exe might not be available.
Unless you want to embed HtmlWindow I'd go with wxWindows... works everywhere without problems so far for me.
I have both worked with PyQt and wxPython extensively.
PyQt is better designed and comes with very good UI designer so that you can quickly assemble your UI
wxPython has a very good demo and it can do pretty much anything which PyQT can do, I would anyday prefer PyQt but it may bot be free for commercial purpose but wxPython is free and is decent cross platform library.
Qt is a good choice to start with. In my opinion it has a best (easy to use, simple & informative) API Documentation. Package also includes many examples - from very basic to complex. And, yep, it`s truly crossplatform.
Check Qt Licensing page, the library is free only for GPL projects.
I`m using QDevelop as text editor, but there are many other alternatives - Eclipse, KDevelop, Code:Blocks, VS plugin & etc.
Why not use swing and java? It is quite cross platform, and looks reasonable for form apps. If you squint a bit and ignore the java, its quite pleasant - or alternatively, use one of them dynamic languages on the JVM (Groovy is my recommended one).
What kind of application is it going to be? Have you considered a web-based application instead? Web-based apps can be super flexible in that sense - you can run them on any platform that has a modern browser.
By far the simplest choice for creating native cross-platform applications is REALbasic. Give it a try and you'll have a working app for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux in minutes. No run-times or other stuff to worry about.
I think you should try Html Application.It is something like web page it contain DHTML,java script,ActiveX but it is execute like .exe .
Edit:
Sorry for advice you html application.I just know it can run on windows only.