[prog] Choice of cross-platform language and GUI toolkit / IDE

[Andrea Landaker]

> I'm wanting to start creating some cross-platform programs, mostly database
> systems with GUI (non-HTML) frontends.

I don't have a whole lot of experience with programming cross-platform GUIs, 
but here's some information from me and my husband that might be useful.

Java will be slow, and it will use lots of memory (comparatively speaking, of 
course), but it is definitely one of the easiest platforms to use 
cross-platform, since that's what it's made to do.  :-)  I've never found 
Swing really easy to use, though -- it's kind of buggy.

KDevelop has a feel and features similar to the MSVisual C++, and QTDesigner 
is a really good GUI creator, if you're using QT (it creates the code in C++ 
of course, but you could call that from a Ruby or Python program).  However, 
be aware that creating the Windows binaries will involve downloading QT's 
special plug-in that only works with MS Visual C++ 6.0, I think.  Also, some 
of QT's tools are not free - the MacOS ones, for example (although you could 
always just require them to run it under X, which comes with OSX, but then it 
won't look like a native Mac program).  QT also has lots of nice database 
libraries and things.  

You might also want to look at FOX (http://www.fox-toolkit.org) -- it's in 
C++, but it's designed to be used with Python or Ruby, too.  It's pretty 
lightweight, though, which can be good or bad depending on what you want.

One thing to note about wxWindows is that it does use GTK under Unix, and if 
you don't like the way GTK looks, you might not like that.

If you're doing anything at all remotely related to databases, you might want 
to look at TOra (http://www.globecom.se/tora/).  It's a great database 
administration tool that is cross-platform and open source (and a good 
example of a successful, professional-looking cross-platform program).

I hope this helps you!

-- 
Andrea Landaker
qirien at icecavern.net
http://www.icecavern.net/~qirien/