Phoenix.pm: survey says: what's the best GUI toolkit, and how do I use it?

Michael Friedman friedman at highwire.stanford.edu
Fri Feb 6 16:34:47 CST 2004


Scott,

I don't have any opinions on the matter, since I've never written 
anything with a local GUI, but I have Mac OSX 10.3 (Panther) and would 
be willing to install and test things for you, if you like.

-- Mike

On Feb 5, 2004, at 8:15 PM, Scott Walters wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I need to pick one windowing toolkit for use on Mac, Wintel, and 
> Unicecesez.
>
> Doug, a while back did a lovely presentation on wxWindows, most of 
> which
> I've forgotten, and I lost my handout. Doug, can do you have a link to 
> that
> handout? Or a copy? I'd like to put it on the web, too.
>
> But Mac people tell me that the MacOSX wxWindows does *not* work well, 
> and
> it failed to even compile for a friend when I was going to have him do 
> more
> specific testing.
>
> Perhaps it is still rapidly evolving? Or has it leveled off?
>
> Tk is the most popular, and probably the most stable, but Doug has been
> frustrated by it and bitten by bugs, and it takes information encoded 
> in
> strings rather than some sort of enum or symbolic constant, making the
> interface error prone and klunky.
>
> Gtk is really popular, and Glade sounds nice, though I haven't been 
> able to get
> it to compile for me on NetBSD. It is reasonably well ported, though 
> it should
> be a lot more portable. The Gtk bindings for Perl just leave me 
> scratching
> my head - they're documentation free, or else 100% automatically 
> generated,
> completely unhelpful, method signature listings. Personal experience 
> with Gtk at
> all? There are some tutorials care of Google and I'm going to play 
> with it,
> of course.
>
> X11::Motif is pretty nifty but out of date and Windows and Mac people
> would have to install a lot of stuff to get it to fly. And of course 
> there
> is raw X11::Protocol =)
>
> SDL and SDL_perl is another option for simple UI stuf and easy access 
> to GL,
> but again, the Perl bindings seem to be not-quite-there. I built and 
> installed
> and it only comes back with errors on the sample programs. Someone 
> else who
> installed it on Linux said they had to find a binary distribution but 
> it
> did work.
>
> So, I'm very open at this point. I'll settle on something eventually, 
> but early
> input might keep me from going off in a bad direction or keep me from 
> missing
> a good one =) Any insights, comments, thoughts, or suggestions are 
> most welcome.
>
> Thanks,
> -scott
>
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Michael Friedman                  HighWire Press, Stanford Southwest
Phone: 480-456-0880                                   Tempe, Arizona
FAX:   270-721-8034                  <friedman at highwire.stanford.edu>
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