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I'm trying to find a programming language I feel really comfortable learning and using for desktop/GUI application development. I realize it's unlikely that any language meets ALL of these criteria, but I'd like to find one that meets as many as possible. I've listed the following features ROUGHLY in order from most desirable/important to least.
Ideal Language Features:
Code Style: C/Java-like
GUI Development: Easy, elegant, and platform-Native styling
Community: Widely documented, active development, friendly & helpful, unity of focus
Object-oriented
Garbage Collection, no worrying about pointers, etc
Native compilation, NO 3rd-party runtimes like GTK or .NET
Multi-platform (can be compiled on *nix, Windows, Mac)
Reasonably fast
Mixed typing (soft-typed, OR both soft- and strict-typed -- i.e. Pike)
Background:
Most importantly, I need something that is straight foward and reasonably familiar, and something that isn't going to require a deep understanding of platform-specific APIs. I can't afford to spend a lot of time learning to develop Win32 apps in C++ for example. I've used wxWidgets, and liked the basic usage, but I'm really wanting to use a language with garbage collection, dynamic typing, and so on.
My frustration with Java, C#, and others is the need for a 3rd party runtime. I don't want end users to have to worry about installing and maintaining a separate platform.
Now then. Ideas??
Haha, due to the constraints you imposed you are now left with HTML and javascript. Good luck :)
The answer to your question is simply: None.
You excluded all desirable languages and platforms in your question.
I'd suggest you throw away your aversion against .NET and go with Delphi Prism. It's not C#, it is cross-platform compatible (everything is officially supported on Mono) and you can create applications that bring the runtime with them (Mono as part of your application).
I'd suggest Groovy and Griffon. Groovy is a dynamic language (like Ruby / Python) that runs on the JVM and integrates with millions of Java libraries out there easily. Griffon is a high-productivity RAILS-like framework for developing GUIs. Groovy has been around for 5 years and has a robust community and is supported by SpringSource (now division of VMWare). Griffon is a bit younger, but also has a fairly robust community.
These seem to fit your criteria.
I know I switched from Java to Grails (web framework written in Groovy that's similar to Rails), and haven't looked back.
Have you looked at QT? It's a really great GUI library and there are bindings for just about every language in common usage. There is a ton of documentation and a wide community. You mention that you want to do something in a language with garbage collection and dynamic typing, but rule out Python and Ruby, which are the 2 most popular languages that fit this criteria (also, they both have great QT bindings, I use pyQT4 and it is just awesome). They really aren't that far from what you do in Java/C, you just end up writing a lot less.
Wow you really limit your choices. I'm going to jump on the QT bandwagon and recommend C++.
Most of the objects in QT inherit from another object that sort of does it's own garbage collection.
There is incredible documentation out there for it.
QT is extremely powerful and has most of the elements you would like, and is extensible if you want to modify elements yourself.
If you do a static build for your release build the people you give the application to won't need distribute any other libraries as they will all be built into the .exe file.
The next iteration of Delphi is said to be cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux). I think it meets all your requirements except garbage collection.
No language meets all of those restrictions. Technically, it sounds like you're asking for something almost identical to Java but then explicitly disallow Java for unstated reasons. Conceptually, it sounds like you're looking for Python or Ruby but disallow them for using slightly different syntax.
Given the order of priorities, I think the closest you'll find in existing languages might be C with the Boehm GC and GTK+ for the GUI (and GLib for the object system). You do say "No GTK" under "No third-party runtime required", but I'm not sure what "runtime" you refer to here, since IIRC it's just a bunch of C libraries.
Given the specificity of the requirements, I think your best bet is to write your own language. Compilers really aren't that hard to write anymore. There are off-the-shelf tools to help with parsing and code generation and math and text processing and GC and so on. Once you get started you'll probably find people willing to help port it. Many existing cross-platform GUI libraries (like wxWidgets) use C/C++ so if you have a decent FFI you can use that, too. You want "support" and "documented" but if you're the primary author you'll understand it better than anybody. The hardest part about a language is design, and it sounds like you have a picture in your head of exactly what the language should be already.
There are a few if you can accept either WxWindows or GTK or QT as a toolkit.
In the order of my personal preference would be:
Eiffel Studio
D with the D-GTK binding
F#
javascript?
might be not the fastest one and doesn't fully address all your needs, but hey... its everywhere and easy to learn
didn't read after the list, but with prism You can probably achieve most your goals.
or You can try Qt and c++ autopointers
Silverlight could actually give you enough cross-platform availability to use C#/.NET, but I am not sure it fits all your requirements.
Sounds like Action Script 3 will make you happy. But it's more web oriented but you could try to make a projector or an Air application. I think it's a good solution because you can do anything with AS3 (image, video, text, sound video text keyboard and mouse input, pear to pear and 3d since flash 10, ...) and it's cross platform and you can use it on the web or your desktop :)
If you are a pure root coder (using vim and only command line for ex) you can make your whole app without using the flash ide, by just writing your as files and compiling them with mxmlc (that comes with the free flex sdk).
I suggest Python. Although it doesn't fit your first requirement of coding style, but it fits all your other requirements!
GUI Development: Easy, elegant, and platform-Native styling --> Yes
I'd suggest that you try wxPython (wxWidgets for Python). This is so "native" on Python that about 90% of all the wxWidgets code examples on the Internet are for Python! I've personally used TkInter, Gtk and wxPython. All of them are well supported on Python. My personal choice is wx.
Community: Widely documented, active development, friendly & helpful, unity of focus --> YES
Object-oriented --> Yes
Garbage Collection, no worrying about pointers, etc --> Yes
Native compilation, NO 3rd-party runtimes like GTK or .NET --> Yes. - You can eiter:
pack a single dll with your code - or
use py2exe which is able to create a single executable out of your project
Multi-platform (can be compiled on *nix, Windows, Mac) --> Yes.
Reasonably fast --> Yes. Well, it's not the fastest out there, but close enough that some serious projects are done in Python only.
Mixed typing (soft-typed, OR both soft- and strict-typed -- i.e. Pike) --> Yes.
Regarding your first requirement I'd say that you should give Python at least a try. It requires very little effort to get started. There is a 2-hour tutorial which gives you a serious introduction. There's a Basic to Advanced tutorial where I'd almost guarantee that you'll be writing your first application on the second day.
I also feel your pain Brian. Most time when I ask questions about desktop GUIs the only answer I get is: "Make it Web". You really nailed it, since your question is still open inspite some really non-constructive answers...
I've been watching closely JavaFX 2, it solves some of Swing problems and seems very promising. This may be the only thing Oracle did right since getting Java from Sun.
UPDATE:
.NET is finally becoming an open-source, cross-platform solution. .NET Core allows native compilation for multiple devices.
The new .NET experience is exactly what I was looking for when I asked this question several years ago.
Original:
Lots of good suggestions, despite being salted with negativity throughout.
I think I'm going to go with C# and Mono. I like C# well enough syntactically (I've been accused often of being shallow, but the syntax of a language is just as important to me as its features, because I spend a lot of time writing in that particular syntax). Although similar to Java, it has a few unique features that I appreciate, and I think the community seems more open-minded.
My biggest complaint about Java besides performance, frankly, is the community. It seems infected with an excess of arrogance, and it also seems to be very fragmented in terms of support for and development on various overlapping libraries, tools, and so on. The community surrounding Mono seems much more organized.
Actually, so does .NET itself, for that matter. Sun is a big enterprise company that seems every bit as confused about what it IS and what it DOES as Microsoft or IBM, yet they seem to be doing an even worse job of leading and organizing their platform than Microsoft, which is pretty tragic.
I've been developing Windows based applications for a long time and most of my present clients still desire a desktop or client/server Windows application. Is it possible to use Ruby for such applications as opposed to its primary purpose of being a Web-programming language?
Ruby is not primarily a web programming language even though Ruby on Rails is certainly suited for web development. Ruby is a general purpose scripting language.
The FXRuby and WxRuby frameworks are the most fully featured GUI frameworks for Ruby. You can write the apps in Ruby and then generate a Windows executable. The frameworks are cross-platform, so you could also run the apps written in these on other platforms, like Linux or Mac OS X.
There are also a few other less popular approaches like QtRuby and Shoes, and you can even use IronRuby (a CLR Ruby implementation) to write a .Net application.
Ruby is a general purpose object oriented scripting language. Ruby on Rails is a web application framework. Ruby predates Rails by about ten years. Don't confuse the two.
Yes, you can. Ruby is a full scripting language. You might want to start with the Ruby language homepage to see the capabilities and libraries that are available.
However, just because you can doesn't mean that you should. Before jumping in and using Ruby for a project, see if Ruby can give you things that other languages can't or if there are any disadvantages to using Ruby.
I know this thread is old, but for future reference to anyone who's looking into options for using Ruby for a GUI app, don't use QtRuby. I had developed a project for school in about a week, fully functional and pretty, only to find out that I could not release it. There was simply no way to package and distribute the application without having your users simulate your exact environment (install all the gem dependencies, build Qt development libraries etc). I tried using:
Crate: supposedly cross-platform, but I found only 1 usage example that's written in 2008 out of ~2 hours of googling, and the example basically covers a very specific subset of applications (some ssl/https authentication gem or w/e...)
Ocra: this looks like a candidate, but it's windows-only and didn't meet my requirements, as I had to target the three primary platforms
tar2rubyscript + rubyscript2exe: I had spent most of my time trying to get this to work because I've come across many who claimed that this is the way to go for distributing GUI apps built in ruby (albeit using other toolkits, Tk/GTK/wxRuby) but it didn't work either; I was endlessly faced with a cryptic error that basically breaks Qt::UiLoader functionality, in other words, you can't load .ui sheets you create with QtDesigner so...
Yes I'm angry and frustrated honestly, because I don't see the point of creating software that you just can't release for anyone to use. Now I'm left with a deadline coming up in a week, and I just hope I make it in time porting the app to C++.
So my answer is, don't use QtRuby. At least for now.
On a mac, you can use the Ruby Cocoa lib to create (what appear to be) native applications. If you want something more cross platform then you might consider a wrapper like shoes or qt.
The Qt toolkit seems the most popular way to do it. The website is http://www.darshancomputing.com/qt4-qtruby-tutorial/
I'm currently writing a little app in a wrapper called Shoes. This seems to make it as simple as pie to create windowed apps in ruby. http://shoes.heroku.com/ is the website.
At the moment Shoes looks suitable only for small personal apps. I say this because it's author recently went AWOL and it's not clear whether it will be developed further. I'm using it to write a game log parser to generate statistics from a flight sim. It's ticking along nicely.
Ruby can be used for developing GUI applications, whether Windows specific or cross-platform.
For Windows targetted you should look at the work going on with IronRuby since they have good integration with the .NET framework overall and with Silverlight, in the event you want to do apps that can bridge web and desktop. At this point IronRuby can be used to develop for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) or WinForms.
For cross-platform you have Ruby bindings for QT, FOX and others.
You should look at IronRuby - WPF and windows forms are both supported:
I never did to much GUI programming (besides a bit of QT and Delphi).
I need to write simple GUI app which would interactively visualize graphs.
Very similar tool to "GraphViz GUI for Mac".
What would you suggest?
Thanks.
I think it really depends on the platform that you're targeting. If you are writing native apps for the Mac, Objective-C is probably the best choice, as the APIs are built around that. If you're writing for Windows, you probably want C/C++ or C#, for the same reason. Cross-platform apps would make you choose a platform-neutral language, such as Java, or Python (as jldupont suggested).
I use quite a few and I'd say C# in Visual Studio on Windows (which is great, and free!), and something like C#+MonoDevelop (or equally a scripting language like Perl) and Glade/GTK on Linux/BSD/other UNIX's while on Mac OS then XCode and Interface Builder are the obvious choice.
I would say C# with Visual Studio Express is the easiest and XCode and Interface Builder have the steepest learning curve. I've not used QT though, so can't compare but imagine it's similar to GTK.
Thinking outside the box a little REALBasic is also excellent at getting the job done (if you can get past the fact that it's OO Basic). It's not free but they recently greatly reduced the price and it's really great to use for simple GUI app development.
Consider Python with PyGTK: cross-platform, documented, proven.
JRuby is a good choice - it's cross platform, and you get the double benefit of a large number of components available for java (for instance, someone probably has done an interactive graph visualisation panel already) and the ability to connect and use them from ruby (which is a great language to program in).
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I've been wanting to become proficient in a new language for a while. There are a few languages I want to learn but it's pretty important for me to be able to create a (Application) GUI. I work in C# so I have become very accustom to the GUI designer.
I would love to get better with C++ or Java (both of which I have a small amount of experience with). Other languages could be interesting too. I just really need to be able to make a GUI reasonably easily.
So what (non .net) language has a really good method of designing GUIs?
An extension to this question might be what are the most common GUI APIs/designers?
I would recommend you to look at Delphi. It's object pascal with a nice IDE and a nice community!
Take a look at www.codegear.com
CodeGear have also a C++ IDE, so you can have the bundle and put your hand dirty at Delphi and C++!
Hope his helps
vIceBerg
I agree with pmlarocque in that you should use NetBeans if using Java. It really makes GUI design easy.
As an aside, I also recommend pencil and paper. That really has helped me throughout the years, start making sketches of what you want it to be then replicate it in the IDE.
For GUI in C++ you should look C++ Builder, you can get Turbo C++ Explorer for free
I use both Visual Studio and Delphi, and the Delphi GUI editor is significantly better. It is worth a try. They make a free version.
May I recommend Flex? Flex Builder has a really nice GUI designer.
As for Java, both NetBeans and Eclipse IDEs are good choices.
To design GUIs in Java, you can use SWT, AWT or Swing widget toolkits.
I heard that some people experienced problems with SWT projects running on NetBeans. However, NetBeans comes with a built-in GUI Builder for Swing , a very powerful widget toolkit.
Of course, there's also a plug-in for Eclipse that allows you to build Swing GUIs, so it basically comes down to which IDE you prefer...
NetBeans has a great Swing GUI Builder (formerly Project Matisse). This is for Java, I think it was started by Sun but is an open source project. Very similar to Eclipse, but I found an advantage with NetBeans due to this GUI builder.
Check it out at: http://www.netbeans.org/features/java/swing.html
The cross-platform Qt GUI framework (which is mainly for C++) comes with Qt Designer.
Interface Builder and Qt Designer are by far the best GUI design tools I've ever used.
WPF/Silverlight: Expression Blend
Not as big as it used to be, but Powerbuilder.
Visual Dataflex has a decent GUI editor. It's a nice solution for building "database-agnostic" database applications.
Use Microsoft Expression Blend to layout your GUI.
WPF...
Before, I was using Qt Designer. First time I started using Expression Blend, I fell in love with it. So much easier to use than Qt Designer.
If your app requires high-performance, back-end it with some native-code language like C++.
If not, just stick with C# or Python.
Remember it's not just the tool that you use, but how it works as a whole
Too many combinations of different languages/vendors sometimes just makes you want to pull your hair our!
Well, I have two options: Objective-C on the Mac using Cocoa GUI framework, or Java for everything (Mac, Linux, MS-Windows) using the Swing API.
If you want to program in Objective-C targeting Mac OS X operating system for Apple Macintosh, iPhone, or iPod Touch - then the Interface Builder that comes bundled with the Xcode IDE (part of the Developer bundle) is really good.
You will need a Mac, of course, to be able to use it. If you have a Linux or Windows PC already, then you probably have a monitor, USB mouse, and USB keyboard. So you could get an Mac Mini for $599 and hook those up to it.
The Developer bundle is free. Just go to developer.apple.com and sign up for free Developer tools once you get your Mac.
If you are going to be a professional developer, then you might want to go there before you get your Macintosh and see if registering as a Pro and buying a Macintosh and stuff under that deal would net you more bang for your buck.
This Interface Builder of Apple's is pretty famous. It is what gave the NeXT computer is high reputation for being the way to create applications really fast. Wall Street financial firms, government agencies, and research types - plus a fair number of 3rd party commercial software developers - used it to create GUI applications very rapidly.
The name of Apple's Cocoa framework, by the way, used to be Next Step. When Apple bough NeXT from Steve Jobs, they renamed Next Step Cocoa. However, the classes still begin with NS as a little artifact of their heritage.
What people like about Interface Builder is that it has a very good layout manager and it lets you "wire" UI objects to other objects, making the latter "targets". Wiring them together this way creates a "connection".
So far this sounds very unexciting, I know. However, it gets exciting when you start doing it. You can design your actual runnable GUI in the designer and actually run it before you have written any code. Writing code lets you incrementally flesh out the user interface that have behavior more than UI stimulus-response behavior.
Anyway, the idea is that you can bang out a prototype extremely quickly, get feedback from someone based on this concrete GUI - and then fill in the details with Objective-C programming.
The most famous thing that was ever created with Next Step (Cocoa) is the World Wide Web (WWW). You may have heard of it. Well, the first web browser in the world was created by Tim Berniers-Lee at CERN in 1989 using Next Step, which had just come out the year before (1988).
He said he liked Next Step because it let him create his web browser very quickly. Even more impressively, his web browser not only allowed users to view web pages - his browsre also let users edit the web pages they viewed.
If you want to program in Java, NetBeans has a very nice Swing GUI designer.
It comes built into NetBeans. The GUI designer very easy to use and seems to have a full set of capabilities. My ownly dislike is that it puts commented sections in the code that you cannot edit. JBuilder did not put those annoying comments/restrictions in but JBuilder has pretty much faded from the scene these days.
Another downside of NetBeans is that it creates a .form file with the same name as the GUI class you are editing. Java code refactoring tools, other than NetBeans, are not going to know about this file. So, if you manually move the package the class is part of (or rename the class) - or use Eclipse or some other program to do it - you are going to have problems. You will need to be sure to use NetBeans to move/rename your class.
Eclipse had one in the form of an experimental plugin that was an okay start for a GUI designer called VE (Visual Editor) a number of years back. However, VE does not appear to have been updated in a couple of years.
I really like the true portability of Java programs. Java programs with GUIs are no exception.
I recommend adopting Java as your new language and using NetBeans as your first IDE, since you favor GUI program designs with a WYSIWYG editor.
Later, I suggest you also learn Eclipse. That way you will benefit from its more powerful code editing/refactoring capabilities.
You do not have to make an either-or choice between the two IDEs. With some caveats, like I have given - you can use both.
Netbeans IDE for Java as a sweet GUI designer.
Java Netbeans is good, and since java is fairly close to c# in syntax, it might make an easy learning experience
wxGlade is a GUI designer that can generate Python, C++, Perl, or Lisp and uses the wxWidgets library. And it's free.
IntelliJ IDEA for Java
http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/gui_builder.html
Here's a video:
http://www.javalobby.org/eps/intellij_ui_designer/
Vaadin
You can write business-oriented desktop-style web apps using only Java on the server side yet rendered automatically using Web standards client-side in the web browser.
The Vaadin Framework provides the magic of letting you define your desired fields, labels, buttons, and other widgets in a layout all using pure Java. By harnassing GWT technology, Vaadin transforms your Java code at runtime into the content for display in a user’s web browser. Your app is rendered using all the Web goodness of HTTP, HTTP/2, HTML, HTML5, CSS, DOM, JavaScript, WebSocket, Push, and so on… but does so transparently to the Java programmer. All that transformation is done under the covers. As a Vaadin programmer, all I deal with is Java coding.
I prefer using the well-documented API to programmatically layout the contents of my forms and widgets for the user-interface. You can do so free-of-cost using the open-source framework.
Alternatively, you can use their commercial product Vaadin Designer for a visual drag-and-drop layout editor tool.
Try the live Sampler and other demos such as Reindeer demo.
Since you mentioned you use C++, I'd recommend MatDeck(https://labdeck.com/comparison/). They offer a GUI Designer in their unique code. Their code is based on C++(It's called MatDeck C++ style code) and since it's specialized to their software it needs a lot less code to run. They offer much more and are a fully-fledged software. They also have a whole page that compares their code(https://labdeck.com/python/c-style-script/).
I want to write a front-end to an application written in C/C++.
I use Solaris 10 and plan to port the application to some other architectures (Windows first).
I'd recommend taking a look at wxWidgets to provide some cross platform UI widgets that will work on Solaris and Windows.
Qt 4 is the best tool for this job. If you want to work with other languages, it also has bindings for Java and Python
On a Mac, this would be easy. The Cocoa API is great when programming in Objective C (which compiles fine with C/C++ files).
Otherwise the situation is a bit more grim. As for Rapid prototype, you might want to check the CodeGear (Borland/C++ Builder) tools. I think their VCL library is cross-platform.
Otherwise, you could interface with a scripting language like Ruby and use fantastic front end libraries like Shoes. Python also interfaces with wxWidgets to make writing cross-platform front ends easy. Keep in mind that this all requires taking time to make sure your C/C++ code can talk to the scripting language. This is not trivial, and the amount of effort required depends upon the style of your code base. (Oh my God.)
Lastly, you could just use wxWidgets itself. This might be your best bet since it requires no additional overhead than coding the UI itself. That said, C++ is not the greatest language for designing UIs.
And super lastly, consider writing a code generator that converts from say Shoes to whatever wxWidgets code is needed to generate the same Shoes app. That way you can do easier UI design but still get C++ code in the end. Likewise, you could code gen off of the Python/wxWidgets code. Then sell such a code generator. :-)
GTK-- and Glade.
Thats' the C++ bindings on GTK
GTK will work on windows ( just look at GIMP )
Works everywhere, no QT license to mess with your millions-making.
I use wxWidgets myself. It makes good use of the C++ language features and uses smart pointers, so object and memory management is not that hard. In fact, it feels like writing in a scripting language.
Coupled with a dialog editor/code generator like wxFormBuilder or wxDesigner, (links to screenshots) it becomes a good toolkit for rapid development.
Have a look at FLTK which supports X11 and Windows.
Ultimate++ is a cross platform rapid application development framework for C++. It is aimed specifically at rapid development. The Ultimate++ website provides some comparisons to other frameworks mentioned such as Qt and wxWidgets.
I have used ASP.NET Web Forms to make UI front-end to collection of command line application written in legacy language, RESTful-ish web service, and bash scripts.
Once it works on Firefox, it should work at least on Firefox on other architecture. If you haven't played around with it, you should give ASP.NET a try (ASP.NET MVC seems to be the current trend). Not quite the same as RAD, but it does give you visual design of forms etc.