[Liverpool] Way back into technical topics

[Sebastian Arcus]

I'll volunteer and steer back the conversation into technical topics :-)

I'm planning on starting to learn GTK+ (and brush up on my C in the 
process) as a handy tool for building apps which can be compiled to run 
on Windows and Linux. I'm mainly interested in database driven, business 
type apps.

What I like about GTK+:
1. It's been around for a long time, so there should be plenty of 
material out there, support, tutorials, code samples etc.
2. Haven't look closely, but I guess there should be 
bindings/libraries/drivers for interfacing with most database engines.
3. I assume it has suitable support for things like printing, file 
system access, various peripherals access in both Windows and Linux 
(some of them less to do with GTK+ and more to do with libraries 
available for C, I guess).

Does anybody here have experience with working with GTK+? Any thoughts 
for, or against? I am after a widget set/framework which can generate 
apps for both Windows and Linux. Also with a relatively rich set of 
widgets. I've tried the XULrunner platform from Mozilla - and found it 
great in many ways. Really enjoyed programming on it, the look and 
behaviour of the widgets, the support for Windows and Linux out of the 
box. I could have coped with only having SQLite as a database (although 
less then ideal). However, when I reached the point where I needed to 
print from my app, I was told I could only print HTML frames - none of 
the other elements of an XUL project. Something to do with year old bugs 
in the code which have never been fixed. So that pretty much put me off 
the entire idea. A platform without proper printing support is not much 
use for what I need.

Anybody else any thoughts on the matter?

Sebastian