Re: [ossig] gtk applications ?

[Ditesh <ditesh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>To be honest, in general, all the gui toolkits do more
>or less the same thing (they have to after all).
>  
>

Well yes, but that's like saying all networking libraries do more or 
less the same thing. Given the end goal is the same, they _would_ do 
more or less the same thing, wouldn't they?

>After you've looked at a few (Qt, gtk, tk, wxwindows)
>they all start to look similar. Imho the strengths and
>weaknesses are not really technical. It's more like
>  
>

Ah, you mean the API's are similar? I wouldn't doubt that they had 
significant "borrowing" from each other (after all, good ideas are memes 
that get hijacked in new implementations). But there are also 
differences and improvements - for example, purely in the context of 
language "elegance" and "cleanliness" (two very subjective viewpoints, 
I'd rather use Java+Swing over C+GTK. Also, considerations such as the 
flexibility of widgets, ability to easily build new widgets etc are 
important too.

>questions of long term development, active development
>of the toolkit, how widespread it is and so on. Gtk+
>has a lot going for it. XFCE, GNOME, Inkscape, GIMP
>  
>

The common toolkits have been around for sometime and are relatively 
mature. The only exception would be GTK# which is relatively new and not 
mature, but it's good enough for a start and given the skills of 
developers behind mono+gtk#, I wouldn't doubt that it would be an 
excellent toolkit in the near future.

>and Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird use it. Incidentally,
>if you develop mozilla apps, you are implicitly using
>gtk, at least on unix. 
>  
>

Or if you could be using XUL, if you develop _on_ Mozilla :-)

>The thing *I* like about gtk is that it's relatively
>compact (compare it to Qt!) and fast (XFCE) if you
>disregard gnomelib and co.
>  
>

While compactness and speed are clearly important considerations, I tend 
to place code cleanliness, elegance and design over them, reason being 
that with thousands of lines of code, I tend to lose track of details 
and a language+implementation with high code cleanliness, elegance and 
design help me in that respect. In other words, the toolkit cannot be 
viewed in isolation, you need evalutate the language platform too (with 
the relevant bindings, of course). For example, I like Java but not 
Swing, so I'd use Java + SWT which is a good combination IMHO.

As for PHP for gui work, I think the bindings are as not mature as 
alternatives. Give it some time, let the adoption of PHP 5 pick up and 
let PHP 5 OO paradigm affect the bindings and then I'd use it for gui work.

Ditesh


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