I'm wondering what programming enviroment to use for following:
GUI interface for user (linux/KDE/Gnome), very basic, nothing fancy. Also I need MySQL access from the SW.
You don't give too many details on what you're trying to do or whether it's for you own use or a commercial product, etc. Expect answers to be of a general nature. For basic GUI building the best solution by far (IMHO) is Tcl/Tk. What can be achieved in 20 lines of Tcl is quite astonishing. You mention Qt, and PyQt is an option if you can accept the licencing terms. It's considerably lower level, and hence much harder and slower work than Tcl/Tk. From what you say it's also probably overkill for what you need. I gave up with it because I found it inefficient for my needs, and it crashes mysteriously every so often which is seriously annoying. If you choose Tcl/Tk you need some MySQL bindings. Start here: http://mini.net/tcl/mysql. Alternatively you might prefer Perl/Tk. The Perl DBI database interface is second to none, but the interface to the Tk GUI toolkit sucks rocks. Perl/Tk is pretty much unusable to someone experienced with Tcl/Tk. Perhaps a good compromise is Python and Tkinter. Python is a fine language and has a good MySQL binding module. Once again, though, the Tk Toolkit binding isn't great. Which to choose? If the GUI is important and you envisage doing lots of maintenance to it, use Tcl/Tk with the MySQL binding. If the database interaction is the main part of the project go for Perl or Python and suffer the lousy GUI interface. If it were me, and the project allowed it, I'd write the application logic in Perl or Python as command line tools, then bolt a Tcl/Tk front end onto it. Don't dismiss this method - an awful lot of Linux tools are structured like that. --
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