Re: Please use wxWidgets

In article news:<#4eQU4KXFHA.3144@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Keith MacDonald
wrote:
> For all the reasons given, it's an exellent GUI toolkit for
> non-commercial applications.

... and, indeed, for commercial applications.

> However, paying customers may not be happy with the subtle
> differences in the XP user interface, ...

I'm not sure how current versions of wx cope with the worst excesses of
XP's gratuitous eye-candy. There were some issues but I believe that many
if not all of them have been addressed.

Personally, I always install XP with the "classic" Win2k-like appearance
and have noticed no problems at all with wx in this configuration.

> ... nor with the code bloat.

There is no bloat. wx is a comprehensive and fully-featured toolkit and as
such it does contain a lot of code. If you use all the fetaures then you do
get a big application footprint, but it isn't "bloat". If you don't use the
features they needn't take any space (unless you link against a DLL
containing the full library). Note that other toolkits -- like MFC and Qt
-- are also not small (though MFC is supplied with Windows, so at least one
doesn't have to ship it).

> Developers may not be happy with its lack of support for MDI.

wx doesn't (or didn't, last time I looked) support MDI applications whose
document windows are children of a main frame window on non-windows
platforms -- or rather on platforms that don't support window decorations
(e.g. title bar, etc) on non-top-level windows. The reason for that is
simply that on those platforms child windows of that type are not supported
by the underlying widget-set, and so Windows-like MDI applications would be
(a) hard to implement on those platforms, and (b) unfamiliar to users of
the platform.

That's not a complete answer, of course. There's no reason why a developer
shouldn't seek to write apps using child windows on, say, linux (and there
are toolkits running on top of wx that make it possible) but it's a
reasonable excuse.

wx *does* fully support MDI applications using multiple top-level Windows
(which seems to be the current vogue on Win32, anyway) on all platforms,
and can with only a little extra effort support MDI with child windows on
Win32 and with multiple top-level windows on linux from the same codebase.

> MFC is clearly a dead end., but safe for a while yet ...

It's not clear to ME that MFC is a dead end. It remains the best framework
for single-platform native-code Windows application development and seems
likely to continue to be so for as long as there is native-code development
on the Windows platform.

> ... while QT and .Net are other options.

Qt is a direct competitor to wx as a cross-platform GUI framework. It has
many of the same advantages and disadvantages as wx, and a heft price-tag.

NET isn't directly a competitor to wx and Qt, it doesn't provide
cross-plaform GUI capability, which is the main advantage these toolkits
offer (Winforms is a pretty poor GUI target, and Mono doesn't implement it
fully). What .NET is good for -- and what Java is good for, too -- is web
application development, and web applications are not (nor will they ever
be) all there is to programming.

Cheers,
Daniel.


.

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