On Wednesday 25 June 2003 15:03, Monaghan, John wrote:
I think the problem with the replies is that they are all subjective (which is natural).
To a certain degree, yes. But I think most of those who replied have a somewhat educated opinion about the topic, more often than not based on personal experience. In my old job a few years ago (before I joined SuSE) I had looked around to find a suitable multi-platform toolkit for that exact purpose. I evaluated several of those things and came to the conclusion that the type of toolkit that just sits on top of other toolkits are insufficient for almost everything because they tend to give you the least common denominator for each target platform - which is very little. Don't expect a feature-rich environment if you choose one of those. I just saw you are writing from a .de domain, so also look at this: http://www.suse.de/~sh/qt/
Whilst I don't have any problems with QT, here is what I would say is the "other side" to give a balanced view.
1. I have to say that I emailed Julian Smart, the creator of wxwindows a few times (I too had lots of questions) and was very impressed with the replies; disregarding technical merit for the moment, I would recommend wxwindows politically.
Are you talking about technical support and response times or about the more "political" issues?
2. I know you said "apart from the licence", but I also found this to be an important factor.
No, not really. Because...
Basically, if you want to create free software (libre) and distribute it, then you can. However if you want to create commercial software, you can with wxwindows but can't with QT unless you buy the full product (expensive).
The Qt commercial development environment does have its price (although I consider it really reasonable). But for commercial products this really is no important factor at all: It's in the order of one or two "man-days" (the cost of a developer per day). This is negligible for a commerical company. It's runtime licences that would really hurt. And Qt does have none (execpt for Qt/Embedded which is a completely different issue). You can sell as many of your products as you like without paying any additional fee to TrollTech.
3. I personally think (subjective!) that the C++ implementation is cleaner in wxwindows and doesn't need things such as MOC. It also promises to be as platform independant as possible.
I find Qt's signal/slot concept simply ingenious. This means you can write independent UI components and "plug them together" at a later time. You don't have to subclass your own button from the generic button just to overwrite its "clicked" method to do your thing. You don't have to invent "user IDs" for button messages and clutter your .h files with them. This is what you get for the small price of having a (simple) additional preprocessor like "moc". Do yourself the favour and have a look at the Qt tutorial: http://doc.trolltech.com/3.1/tutorial.html I don't think UI programming can get any easier than this.
I think that a lot of people are enthusiastic about QT because it is used by the "darling" crowd for KDE.
It's the other way round. Qt was chosen as the base for KDE because of its features, its clarity and its ease of programming. They might as well have chosen some different toolkit - but they didn't, for good reasons.
I have no objections with KDE (I use it about 50% of the time) or QT, but like I said earlier we need to stay as objective as we can.
You do that. If you do, I am confident you won't abandon Qt so lightly. ;-) CU -- Stefan Hundhammer <sh@suse.de> Penguin by conviction. YaST2 Development SuSE Linux AG Nuernberg, Germany