Fox: best GUI Lib?

[gamaron]

Summary
---------

Is Fox Toolkit ( http://www.fox-toolkit.org/ ) the "best" C++ GUI
library/toolkit?

My key goals (at least those that come to mind right now):
* Portability (Windows, Linux, MacOS, other unix)
* Open source
* Maturity
* Broad feature set
* Large community following & support

More Details
-------------

I'm an ex-C++ programmer/designer that has come back to "the fold" after a
long hiatus doing non-programming work (program management, sales,
marketing, etc).

After browsing ( http://www.thefreecountry.com/sourcecode/gui.shtml ), Fox
Toolkit seems to be a clear winner for my goals above.

Maybe I missed something? Can anyone provide other toolkit/library
suggestions...a nd (very important) their associated reasoning? Nothing
I've looked at thus far seems to be nearly as "open-source" available,
popular, and mature. Fox's web presence (web page, mailing lists,
documentation) also seems quite professional, mature, and popular.

(Disclaimer: I realize it's difficult to label something as "best."
Often a solutions choice might heavily depend on the problem to solve and
the problem's associated "environmen t"--be it technical, political,
personal preference, etc. However, I use the word "best" here mostly to
be concise...and to spark some feedback. ;)

Thanks for any help!
-Matt

[Phlip]

gamaron wrote:

Is Fox Toolkit ( http://www.fox-toolkit.org/ ) the "best" C++ GUI
library/toolkit?

My key goals (at least those that come to mind right now):
* Portability (Windows, Linux, MacOS, other unix)
* Open source
* Maturity
* Broad feature set
* Large community following & support
Qt has a slight edge on features and maturity, but it's not strictly open
source.
I'm an ex-C++ programmer/designer that has come back to "the fold" after a
long hiatus doing non-programming work (program management, sales,
marketing, etc).

After browsing ( http://www.thefreecountry.com/sourcecode/gui.shtml ), Fox
Toolkit seems to be a clear winner for my goals above.

Maybe I missed something?

GUI programming works "best" using a language with dynamic typing, such as
Ruby. So if you leave off the C++ requirement, you can find Ruby bindings
for many popular GUI toolkits.

However, all those toolkits were written in C or C++, so...

--
Phlip
http://industrialxp.org/community/bi...UserInterfaces

[Ioannis Vranos]

Phlip wrote:

GUI programming works "best" using a language with dynamic typing, such as
Ruby. So if you leave off the C++ requirement, you can find Ruby bindings
for many popular GUI toolkits.

Here we go again. :-)


--
Ioannis Vranos

http://www23.brinkster.com/noicys

[Karthik Kumar]

gamaron wrote:

Summary
---------

Is Fox Toolkit ( http://www.fox-toolkit.org/ ) the "best" C++ GUI
library/toolkit?

My key goals (at least those that come to mind right now):
* Portability (Windows, Linux, MacOS, other unix)
* Open source
* Maturity
* Broad feature set
* Large community following & support

More Details
-------------

My vote goes to FLTK. I had tried wxWidgets and FOX before. I find
FLTK API relatively easy to deal with.
As the name says, it is really a light-weight
toolkit. It is portable, open source, matured and got a large community
following and support. Whether it got a broad feature set would be
entirely subjective and I leave it to your choice depending on your
application.

--
Karthik. http://akktech.blogspot.com .
'Remove _nospamplz from my email to mail me.'

[Phlip]

Ioannis Vranos wrote:

Phlip wrote:

GUI programming works "best" using a language with dynamic typing, such as Ruby. So if you leave off the C++ requirement, you can find Ruby bindings for many popular GUI toolkits.

Here we go again. :-)

Or Lisp. ;-)

--
Phlip
http://industrialxp.org/community/bi...UserInterfaces

[Ioannis Vranos]

Phlip wrote:

Here we go again. :-)

Or Lisp. ;-)

Lisp sounds OK I guess. :-)


--
Ioannis Vranos

http://www23.brinkster.com/noicys

[Ivan Vecerina]

"gamaron" <ma**@downwiths pammers-mengland.net> wrote in message
news:46******** *************** *******@localho st.talkaboutpro gramming.com...

Summary
---------

Is Fox Toolkit ( http://www.fox-toolkit.org/ ) the "best" C++ GUI
library/toolkit?

My key goals (at least those that come to mind right now):
* Portability (Windows, Linux, MacOS, other unix)
* Open source
* Maturity
* Broad feature set
* Large community following & support

How would you compare Fox to WxWidgets? (http://www.wxwidgets.org/)
For each of the goals above, I think wxWidgets scores pretty well.
I haven't heard of Fox as often as of Wx. While Fox is more recent,
I does not seem to have avoided the mistakes of its predecessors
(e.g. heavy use of macros for event dispatching...)
NB: I'm just gesssing from a quick review of the docs on the site

Ivan
--
http://ivan.vecerina.com/contact/?subject=NG_POST <- email contact form

[Steven T. Hatton]

Phlip wrote:

gamaron wrote:

Is Fox Toolkit ( http://www.fox-toolkit.org/ ) the "best" C++ GUI
library/toolkit?

My key goals (at least those that come to mind right now):
* Portability (Windows, Linux, MacOS, other unix)
* Open source
* Maturity
* Broad feature set
* Large community following & support

Qt has a slight edge on features and maturity, but it's not strictly open
source.

There /is/ a very capable opensource subset of Qt. The entire KDE[*] is
written using that subset and extensions thereof. I'm not going to get
into the game of judging what is the best. Qt, from what I've seen, is the
most successfull in terms of creating useful application. GTK has it's
bragging rights [**] as well, but since this is a C++ newsgroup, I have to
observe that it is not a C++ toolkit. It does have some C++ wrappers,
however.

My approach has been to write code that remains as independent of any
particular toolkit as possible, and to treat the GUI as an interface. That
is often easier said than done. Quite often much of what a program does is
to provide a user interface.

I find the "hard parts" of figuring out the algorithms and logical
structures are usually far easier than providing an interface to them.
[*] http://www.kde.org/
[**] http://www.mozilla.org/
--
"If our hypothesis is about anything and not about some one or more
particular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics. Thus
mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we
are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." - Bertrand
Russell

[Phoenix Fyrestar]

The only problem with Qt is that you have to buy a book* (C++
GUthereafterrrm ing with Qt 3)** to get the GPL version for windows. I
agree that it's a great toolset, and if you don't already know Qt, the
caveat about buying the book doesn't really apply, since this is simply the
best documentation on Qt available, and you'll want to fork over for the
book anyway (I think it cost me $30 at Barnes and Nobel, probably be able
to find it cheaper if you look on Amazon).

* Since it's the GPL version, you really don't have to buy the book, just
find someone to give you a copy of the libraries, but that's the only
"official" way to get it for windows that I know of.

** Qt 4 should be comming out soon (or is it out now?) and soon thereafter a
new book.

Steven T. Hatton wrote:

Phlip wrote:

gamaron wrote:

Is Fox Toolkit ( http://www.fox-toolkit.org/ ) the "best" C++ GUI
library/toolkit?

My key goals (at least those that come to mind right now):
* Portability (Windows, Linux, MacOS, other unix)
* Open source
* Maturity
* Broad feature set
* Large community following & support

Qt has a slight edge on features and maturity, but it's not strictly open
source.

There /is/ a very capable opensource subset of Qt. The entire KDE[*] is
written using that subset and extensions thereof. I'm not going to get
into the game of judging what is the best. Qt, from what I've seen, is
the
most successfull in terms of creating useful application. GTK has it's
bragging rights [**] as well, but since this is a C++ newsgroup, I have to
observe that it is not a C++ toolkit. It does have some C++ wrappers,
however.

My approach has been to write code that remains as independent of any
particular toolkit as possible, and to treat the GUI as an interface.
That
is often easier said than done. Quite often much of what a program does
is to provide a user interface.

I find the "hard parts" of figuring out the algorithms and logical
structures are usually far easier than providing an interface to them.

[*] http://www.kde.org/
[**] http://www.mozilla.org/

[Steven T. Hatton]

Phoenix Fyrestar wrote:

The only problem with Qt is that you have to buy a book* (C++
GUthereafterrrm ing with Qt 3)** to get the GPL version for windows. I
agree that it's a great toolset, and if you don't already know Qt, the
caveat about buying the book doesn't really apply, since this is simply
the
best documentation on Qt available, and you'll want to fork over for the
book anyway (I think it cost me $30 at Barnes and Nobel, probably be able
to find it cheaper if you look on Amazon).

* Since it's the GPL version, you really don't have to buy the book, just
find someone to give you a copy of the libraries, but that's the only
"official" way to get it for windows that I know of.

** Qt 4 should be comming out soon (or is it out now?) and soon thereafter
a new book.

You are correct. I had forgotten about that. I haven't booted into Chi Rho
in months, so I haven't had to deal with issue lately. As for the Qt book,
it's a damn good book!

http://www.accu.org/bookreviews/publ...p/cp003567.htm

--
"If our hypothesis is about anything and not about some one or more
particular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics. Thus
mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we
are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." - Bertrand
Russell