Re: GUI stuff
> On Tue, 16 Feb 1999, David Webster wrote:
> I am wanting to start some GUI development but I am having a hard time
> figuring out just what the GUI development is? I see that the GTK
> libaraires are the base C++ GUI class libraries, but I also see stuff
> like Gnome and qt* and Glib, and other stuff. Is there any online
> documentation that sorts all this stuff out? What are the compliments
> in the Linux/X11 world to MFC/IOCL in the Win32 world? What about
> resource editors and stuff like that???
>
I am a KDE user and enthusiast, so my biases are pretty obvious. I also
really
hate C as a language :-(
Qt is a OOP library weitten for X11 and Windows (commercial version) in
C++
It provides the GUI widgets for making interfaces, and some utility
classes for various purposes. Wrappers for other languages exist (C,
perl, python), but are not widely used or are in development. Widgets
can be derived by standard OOP practices.
Its used as the foundation of the K Desktop Environment, which adds some
extra features such as network transparent file access.
KDE is more mature than alternatives for X11 Desktops, except the
venerable and commercial CDE using Motif. The documentation is
excellent - see http://www.troll.no/ for the hyperlinked Qt docs, and an
O'Reilly book by Kalle Dalheimer (a KDE developer) on programming Qt is
due out soon. The Qt license allows free use for free software
development, and Qt is widely and freely available for use by end users
free of charge. Qt 2.0 will be released under an open-source license.
KDE is currently supplied by 3 of the 5 major Linuxes, Suse, Slackware,
Caldera L distributions, as well as FreeBSD and many minor Linux setups.
Its the default Suse and Caldera desktop. Packages for the non
suppliers, Redhat and Debian, are available. KDE is often added by
third party vendors who press CD's of Debian and Redhat etc. Redhat even
include it in Germany for competition against Suse, and has KDE packages
in Rawhide (their open beta system) which may be included with Redhat 6.
Corel supply it on the NetWinder.
Qt is commercially supported on a wide number of Unix systems, as well
as Win 32.
The development of KDE has been fast - about 2.5 years from start to the
second stable release. Development copies can be obtained from daily
tar balls or by using CVS. The makers of Qt, Troll Tech, gaurantee
binary compatibility throughout major release versions ie 1.0 to 1.999x
Qt 1.0 apps will run using Qt 1.42, the latest version (Qt 2.0 being in
beta). For an indication of the features of Qt 2, look at
http://www.troll.no/rsn.html and see if it offers what you need.
If it doesnt or won't, try lesstif (a free motif clone, motif being
defacto unix GUI library), or Tk (a GUI toolkit for tcl, widely used and
with bindings to many other languages like perl, python), fltk (very
fast, light weight toolkit), or a commercial Motif (big money!), or
Xforms (used by Lyx, a latex frontend) or gtk http://www.gtk.org/ (the
underlying toolkit of Gimp and Gnome)
HTH
George Russell
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