[Sussex] GUI toolkits

[Geoff Teale]

Well on the subject of toolkits, the following thoughts:

* If you're doing OO code then Qt is perhaps the best equipped, though I
  have no idea about the perl bindings, perl as an OO language is a
  crime against humanity.  There are some vagues licensing
  issues if you plan to use your code in a commercial environment.  

* Gtk2 is the prettiest, and most modern/complete.  Avoid Gtk+
  1.x like the plague, it's a bit of a munter.  Glade is nice design
  tool and using libglade should make this very simple to use with Perl.

* Tk is ugly, but standard for some languages, I'd avoid it if you plan to
  reuse your skills on another GUI app.

* Curses is very standard, has the advantage of being very light and not
  requiring an X session, but can be fiddly and annoying to work with.

* WXWindows is a roughy copy of the windows GUI toolkit API's - some
  people love it, I hate it, but more conclusively it's not available on
  most machines default builds.

* Fox, is OK, but looks clunky.

* OpenMotif / LessTif are old fashioned looking, but solid and relatively
  easy to use and well documented.

* FLTK is pretty cool, but somewhat obscure.  Worth looking at though.

* Xlib - what real men use ;)

My general advice would be to plump for Gtk2 with libglade·

-- 
Geoff Teale