[Sussex] GUI toolkits

[Geoff Teale]

Thomas Adam enlightened us thus:
================================
> Qt is always an odd-ball, with limited bindings to languages

Qt3 is actually a really professionally put together toolkit and one of
the best I've used, it's really only the licensing that lets it down.
It's also hard to map to non-OO languages so thus more limited than
some others here in terms of bindings.  Oh, and of course theres the
whole C++ preprocessor thing...

> There have been numerous problems with GTK2 apps. 

Err, not for a long time now AFAIK.  In my experience it's _more_ stable and
_more_ secure in recent versions that the 1.x series ever was. 

> There is nothing wrong with GTK1 at all.

There's plenty wrong with Gtk1 - it's conceptually broken in a number
of places, it's API is inconsistent and dirty.  It's looks and feels
ameturish from a programming point of view.

> I actually really like Tk. It has more bindings to languages than
> GTK does.

Tk is fine, but from a purely asthetic point of view it's lacking a lot
on Linux.  I was simply suggesting that if Alan was planning on writing
apps that would have a wider audience than this one that Tk probably
wouldn't be the most appealing skill to learn.

> That depends what you're trying to do in it. I have found it to be
> quite fun.

Concurred.  Again, it has a lot of advantages, but it has certain
quirks that are unique to it and it's not really a gui toolkit at all.

> It's no longer called WxWindows. It's now called WxWidgets, after
> Microsoft stuck their ore in. It does look a little like Windows.

Wasn't aware of that, but all the same I don't like the API style,
graphically it maps onto Gtk anyway as far as I am aware.

> >   people love it, I hate it, but more conclusively it's not available on
> >   most machines default builds.
> 
> The same can be said for other bindings, of course.

Some of them yes.  Most distros that have and X server installed also
have Gtk and tk and a large number of them have Qt and/or lesstif. 

> Nothing obscure about FLTK. It's been around for some time, and has
> heavy use on the XD640 project.

Yep, it's used loads by the movie industry as well, but in terms of
it's developer base it's no Motif, Gtk or Qt.

-- 
Geoff Teale