GUI in Windows

[Chad Netzer]

On Wed, 2003-05-28 at 15:57, morden wrote:

> Is QT more or less stable?

What kind of stability do you mean?  If you are aksing whether it
crashes, I can't say that I use it much (I don't even use KDE).  But it
has a LARGE user base and MANY applications written using it, and many
people who are familiar with it extoll the engineering behind it, so I'd
say it is unlikely to be a source of many crashes (KDE and the open
source users of it have helped make that so).  In fact, most bugs comes
from misunderstood use of the toolkit, than from tollkit bugs
themselves.  QT has excellent documentation, and Tk has fairly good docs
as well.  WxWindows and PyGTK I think have less thorough documentation.
(please correct me, anyone, if that is wrong)

If you are asking whether the programming API is stable, and not
changing much from version to version, then I'd say "probably", although
they are still adding features, and there will be small porting issues
when upgrading to newer version (say from 2.x to 3.x).

Again, I'm not a user, but I have never heard heard an argument against
QT based upon the quaility of the code or the implementation of the
widget set.  Only licensing issues, and some esoteric framework design
issues.


> Ok. Since you claim that Tkinter is stable under Windoze I guess that 
> would be my bet then. Besides, I assume the code will run on UN*Xes also.

I only claim that I've not about Tk being unstable, and you supplied no
information about what *you* heard to make you think otherwise.  I've
used Tkinter for years, and am looking to move away from it, because as
my apps grow bigger, I want something that scales a bit better.  Tk
takes a bit of work to keep track of everything, and is heavily geared
toward "callbacks", which are evil.  You can program in a
model-view-presenter style with Tkinter, but it takes a bit of work.  Qt
and or wxWindows might handle these things a bit better.

If QT's licensing issues are not a concern, I'd suggest you at least try
a bit of PyQT programming.  Otherwise, use Tkinter and know that there
is no common toolkit that is available on MORE platforms than it (at the
moment).

Cheers,

-- 

Chad Netzer
(any opinion expressed is my own and not NASA's or my employer's)