Info on CrossPlatform

Question

I have looked at some of the info on cross platform design. I can't find the answer to one question I have however.

What I would like to do is design my UI's in Delphi (Windows) and X-Code (Mac) with the underlying guts of the program being OS agnostic C++ code. Is this possible to achieve? I see lots of talk about Cross Platform Compilers, Frameworks and GUI tools but I really want to keep the interfaces 100% native.

Please forgive me if this an absurd question but I am relatively new to the world of programming and learning along the way. My company has an extensive catalog of Delphi applications for windows developed over the past 15 years and Delphi is where I have spent most of the last year.

Answer 1

If you are comfortable working with Object Pascal take a look to the FreePascal compiler and Lazarus which is a free cross-platform IDE (available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X).

Answer 2

You should have a look at wxWidgets http://www.wxwidgets.org/ for programming 100%-native.

From my point of view I can't see the benefit of using two different and specific gui designers for two (or more) target platforms. It should be easy to share the code if the platform specific parts are clearly separated in your architecture. wxWidgets gives you the ability to use the same gui definition in both platforms without loosing the native character.

Personally, I wouldn't use C++ for UI design anymore. But why are you using two IDE's? I suggest to use a more abstract language (like Java with Netbeans/Eclipse or even better C#/.Net with VS/Blend) for this UI/event/interaction stuff keeping only some specific parts in an native optimized binary code.

.Net/Mono can use differnt toolkits for the ui style. Today, being "native" within the context of UX and look and feel does mean to follow system specific guidelines, I think. This could be reached by views and adpaters (see google for some design pattern). Look and feel is just a point of styling an app and it could be a native looking style, too. In the WPF-world handles are used only for the host window (and some legacy compatibility reasons using windows forms) but the user won't feel the differenc if you are styling your app like the former win-api-ones.

Qt has also an platform independent approach for the C++-world but is not really native. Qt draws its own controls with a native look and feel (if needed) and comes also with the option to use/share one definition of the UI between different platforms.