Dipping my toes in cross-platform GUI

[Tomás Ó hÉilidhe]

I don't know the first thing about cross-platform GUI programming, so
I'd like to ask a few quick questions.

Which library is best for someone who appreciates portable programming
and correct efficient code, and who'd like the library to fit well with the
C++ Standard Library? Also I'd like the library to work on as many
platforms as possible (Windows, Linux, Mac, and even the new game consoles
such as Playstation 3 and XBox 360 if possible).

I've heard of wxWidgets and Qt, but I haven't a clue what they're like.
I've seen the cross-platform media player, VLAN; it uses wxWidgets and it
looks good. What GUI libraries are all the well-known programs using, such
as Mozilla, Xilinx?

Is there any cross-platform networking library that stands head and
shoulders above the rest?

--
Tomás Ó hÉilidhe

[Joe Greer]

=?UTF-8?B?RXJpayBXaWt zdHLDtm0=?= <Er***********@ telia.comwrote in
news:91******** *********@newsb .telia.net:

>
My point was that they can match the look and feel of a platform, but
seldom more than one. It might have been what you were saying but the
way I read your post you were saying that they can not get the look
and feel right on any platform.

Ahhhh. No, I wasn't trying to say that. What I was trying to say is that it is hard to get
the look and feel right on every platform. Usually the program looks good on the platform
it is developed on, and just a little out of place everywhere else.
joe

[Victor Bazarov]

Joe Greer wrote:

=?UTF-8?B?RXJpayBXaWt zdHLDtm0=?= <Er***********@ telia.comwrote in
news:91******** *********@newsb .telia.net:

>>
My point was that they can match the look and feel of a platform, but
seldom more than one. It might have been what you were saying but the
way I read your post you were saying that they can not get the look
and feel right on any platform.

Ahhhh. No, I wasn't trying to say that. What I was trying to say is
that it is hard to get the look and feel right on every platform.
Usually the program looks good on the platform it is developed on,
and just a little out of place everywhere else.

I think you hit very close to the bullseye. IME, the program looks
good on the platform where the portable GUI library originated.

V
--
Please remove capital 'A's when replying by e-mail
I do not respond to top-posted replies, please don't ask

[suresh]

On Jan 8, 5:35 am, "Tomás Ó hÉilidhe" <t...@lavabit.c omwrote:

I don't know the first thing about cross-platform GUI programming, so
I'd like to ask a few quick questions.

Which library is best for someone who appreciates portable programming
and correct efficient code, and who'd like the library to fit well with the
C++ Standard Library? Also I'd like the library to work on as many
platforms as possible (Windows, Linux, Mac, and even the new game consoles
such as Playstation 3 and XBox 360 if possible).

I've heard of wxWidgets and Qt, but I haven't a clue what they're like..
I've seen the cross-platform media player, VLAN; it uses wxWidgets and it
looks good. What GUI libraries are all the well-known programs using, such
as Mozilla, Xilinx?

Is there any cross-platform networking library that stands head and
shoulders above the rest?

--
Tomás Ó hÉilidhe

Why not Gtkmm (site: http://www.gtkmm.org/ a C++ wrapper over GTK)? It
is purely an GUI library - nothing more, nothing less. Whereas
wxWidgets and Qt are not JUST gui libraries. They have xml parsing
code (it is very basic with SAX and DOM interfaces don't support
Schemas or XSLT - hence I recommend to use Xerces or libxml2 for your
xml code instead of Qt's xml library), networking api, database api
(for Qt) and even Vectors, Lists, Maps their own String classes (like
QString in Qt). Why do you as a these with your gui library. There are
excellent Boost libraries (or open source libraries) to do most of
these in a very better way. No pointing in learning these again. If
you are only interested in GUI application, Gtkmm is a clean api. It
works fine on Windows and excellent on Linux (and UNIX systems like
Solaris, FreeBSD) - I am not sure how it look on Mac.
Glade library (http://glade.gnome.org/) can even make things better.
It generates Glade XML which can be used in C, C++, Python or even in
Java (From their site: By using libglade, Glade XML files can be used
in numerous programming languages including C, C++, Java, Perl,
Python, C#, Pike, Ruby, Haskell, Objective Caml and Scheme. Adding
support for other languages is easy too.), making Gtk not only a cross-
platform UI library but even language independent.
Tomorrow if you want to migrate your C++ project to Java (or Python),
no need to do anything with your Glade XML UI - it is already
portable.

I recommend to have a look at Gtkmm and Glade.