Toolkit

[Simon Toth]

Hi,

first of all, thx for making this software and good luck.

And now to the point. The screenshots look like it is a GTK+
aplication. This is very sad for me. Ok, I know that Gnome and GTK+ is
cool these days because Ubuntu uses Gnome, but this is a technology
application and therefore the Qt toolkit would be an ideal choice.

Could you clarify why GTK+ was chosen?

Simon Toth

[Rui Tiago Cação Matos]

On 29/01/2008, Simon Toth <Happy.C...@gmail.com> wrote:
> And now to the point. The screenshots look like it is a GTK+
> aplication. This is very sad for me. Ok, I know that Gnome and GTK+ is
> cool these days because Ubuntu uses Gnome, but this is a technology
> application and therefore the Qt toolkit would be an ideal choice.
>
> Could you clarify why GTK+ was chosen?

I'd say because Colin already knew PyGTK and didn't want to lose time
learning other toolkit/language while he could be doing real
productive work just as he has been doing with hotwire :-)

Rui

[Colin Walters]

On Jan 29, 4:10 am, Simon Toth <Happy.Cerbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> first of all, thx for making this software and good luck.
>
> And now to the point. The screenshots look like it is a GTK+
> aplication. This is very sad for me. Ok, I know that Gnome and GTK+ is
> cool these days because Ubuntu uses Gnome, but this is a technology
> application and therefore the Qt toolkit would be an ideal choice.

I'm quite willing to help fix bugs or integration issues that occur in
a Qt-based environment like KDE. Really, please file them!
Have you tried Gtk-Qt? http://gtk-qt.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

[Simon Toth]

Thx, I just want to know why GTK was chosen. Basicaly GTK is realy
"just" a widget library. With Qt you would get a lot of stuff for free
(good configurable syntax highlight for example). I know about gtk-qt
(and this is not my concern), I'm a technologist. I just recomend
using the best tools avaiable.

But well as allways, it's your choice :) I just wanted to know if you
even considered the posibility.

Simon Toth

[Colin Walters]

On Jan 29, 12:18 pm, Simon Toth <Happy.Cerbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But well as allways, it's your choice :) I just wanted to know if you
> even considered the posibility.
>

Basically Hotwire started its life as a prototype (and in many ways,
it still is). But as Rui said - I know Python and I know GTK+ both
pretty well, and wasn't really interested in blocking on learning
something new. It just happened that at some point I was like "hey
wow, I can actually use this thing!", and it's fun to hack on =)

But to get back to your question - is Qt is the right platform to
switch to? What is the best platform to target?

It's actually really frustrating, because in the Free Software world
there are *so many* platforms to choose from. Even the two I use
right now, Python and GTK+, each want to be platforms of their own.
They both for example duplicate the code to spawn subprocesses in a
crossplatform way. They both have data structures like lists and
hashes, Unicode handling, etc. I actually wrote a blog entry recently
about programming languages and platforms:

http://cgwalters.livejournal.com/12380.html

To be honest - If I had to make a guess about the future of client
platforms, at least for personal computers, I would bet on Firefox.
Not in the sense of your-app-as-a-web-page, but in the sense of
XULRunner - reusing some of the Firefox infrastructure like Tamarin
that they plan to ship with Mozilla 2/Firefox 4, and their
crossplatform GUI toolkit (though I'm not really sold on XUL as the
API). Firefox is an application that so many Windows and Mac users
already have installed, it's pretty nice to just depend on it.

If I could compile Python to run on the Tamarin VM, we'd be about 50%
of the way there.

SLOC Directory SLOC-by-Language (Sorted)
6450 hotwire python=6450
5599 hotwire_ui python=5599
678 DistUtilsExtra python=678
571 hotvte python=571
536 ui python=536
451 hotapps python=451
83 top_dir python=83

hotwire_ui and hotvte are the parts of the code that "import
gtk" (6171 lines). The other 6500 lines just use the Python standard
library.

With Qt - sure it's a nicer experience than GTK+ on Windows, but who
knows if Nokia will really try to keep trying to push the (currently
money-losing) business of selling Windows toolkit licenses, versus
going all out for mobile?

On Linux, Qt/GTK+ is pretty much a wash. GTK+ has pretty much
everything we need for Hotwire - it's not really a conventional GUI
application, all we need at the core is a text entry box, and decent
treeview and textview widgets.

[vpere...@gmail.com]

As an end-user mostly, I find these discussions so silly and at times
annoying. Because you can run KDE apps on Gnome and vice-versa just
fine.

[Simon Toth]

Well, you can run them, the question is the functionality, especially
when you are talking about Gnome and KDE apps (meaning applications
build upon Gnome and KDE libraries). GTK nad Qt apps are pretty much
interchangeable (with the exception that GTK apps look very ugly on
default under KDE).

The reason why this question was asked that I personally don't see any
advantages in using GTK over Qt. All disadvantages of Qt are just pure
trolling (Qt will be closed, because nokia bought it - no it won't, if
they stop releasing Qt, the last version will be relicensed under
BSD).

The author had already made himself clear (he already knows GTK+) and
therefore there is no need to discuss this further.

Simon Toth