[ptx] GUI Cross Platform Development

[Sebastian Nowozin]

Yili Zhao wrote:

>>I really regret the switch to wxWindows.

> For GUI cross platform development, I know there are 
> o QT
> o GTK/GTK+
> o wxWidgets
> o FLTK
> o others libraries
> What are the advantages and disadvantages of there libraries? And if can select again, which one is suitable?

A good solution for rapid cross platform GUI's is Gtk# 
(http://gtk-sharp.sf.net/).  It has matured quite a bit (you remember 
the first autopano-sift Gtk# GUI's being horrible to get to work in 
Windows?) in the last few month and easy to use installers are available 
for Windows, and most Linux distributions ship it.

Now, one way how one could wire a Gtk# based GUI to the hugin backend 
would be SWIG (Simple Wrapper and Interface Generator, 
http://www.swig.org/), which builds quite good C# classes from C++ code. 
  Big C++ libraries such as VTK (www.vtk.org) and ITK (www.itk.org) use 
it to build excellent OO wrappers for many languages from C++ code (some 
is heavily templated).

Anyway, I understand some people are reluctant to consider C# as a 
development language on Linux, but I think its a really great thing as 
Mono matured quickly in the last year (www.go-mono.com) and is really 
quite robust and perfectly usable (for GUI frontend work) by now.

I do not know a lot about GUI development at all, but for me I am more 
interested in spending my time on cool algorithms than messing with GUI 
code, and I think Gtk# with C# is a nice combo for that, while still 
being cross platform.

> Best Regards,
> Yili Zhao

bye,
Sebastian