Is Java the best language to develop cross-platform GUI applications? [closed]

Question

I strongly recommend Java for cross-platform GUI development. In particular, I recommend the GUI builder that comes with the Netbeans IDE. It's very simple and very powerful. You can point and click and drag and drop to create a GUI, and easily customize the actions which various buttons and other components take.

I much prefer Python as a language, but none of the free tools for GUI development come anywhere close to this, and the same thing seems to be true for the other languages I've used. (I should point out that QT has wonderful GUI developers for various languages such as C and Python, but it's only free when used on open source projects.)

EDIT: QT has recently been relicensed as LGPL, so you're free to use it in commercial applications. The Python bindings for this (PyQT) have not been re-licensed, but another project called PySide has been created to provide Python QT bindings.

I personally despise the whole concept of emulating the native GUI that is where the Java GUIs are rooted. Instead of being at home wherever you go, it makes you a tourist everywhere, often needing an interpreter. The Eclipse GWT is a better toolkit that makes much better use of local resources, but it still holds that people love to write Java code, and hate to use Java applications, think of it: which Java applications you love on your desktop?

Tk is just as ugly and limited on any operating system you choose to run it onto, and the same goes for Qt, in my opinion.

Mono would need a good try, as it is a way to answer the question "why Linux sucks", if you remember that old post bi Miguel de Icaza. Mono comes with a mature set of widgets and Apis and does not try to limit what you can do in order to give you portability.

Silverlight is close to portable and has a great interface definition language, but lacks access to the system, you have to split the application between a server and UI even on the same machine to overcome it.

Adobe AIR is a dog and local system acces is not easy.

If I am able to choose, I tend to avoid GUIs altogether and try to use a web server, even a local web server, and Json, JQuery and all that stuff. I found out that I can have many more choices and am more productive than with native widgets. This combines the strengths of the use of a real language server side and the wonderful disordered geniality of JavaScript in the GUI.

Yes: use Eclipse RCP. You can write not only cross-platform, but e.g. multilingual applications with it. SWT provides the native look-and-feel for multiple platforms and windowing systems.

So as I understand it, there is currently NO truly cross-platform high level language & GUI toolkit right now.

1. Java is cross-platform, GUIs in both SWT and Swing can look good, when you really try hard to tweak them pixel-precise and provide modifications to the look to supported platforms. There are currently some good GUI designers, but nothing as great as OpenStep 15 years ago.

2. QT is now LGPL'ed so long as you only link to it dynamically. Well but QT has its own set of problems and is a superset of C++. You have to compile against QT-hacked compiler, not the generic C++ one.

3. didn't try the wxWidgets, but from the looks of it, it can work, but is NOT high level toolkit at all!

4. There seems to be an option to write in C# and opensourced .NET and run it via Mono in other platforms than Windows... Didn't try, but it seems to me, that is just porting Microsoft on other platforms.

5. There is GNUstep, but for now it looks for me, like it is only developped by some opensource geek fans. It would be really interesting to see the OpenStep stack outside of the Mac OS X, but for now this looks to me as not viable.

Even Java, while it is self-contained, does not currently provide great GUI designer capabilities. I used the GUI designer tool once when starting to learn how to code with SWT, and now I find myself coding it by hand, which is really not bad, but it really should not be necessary. But that was few years ago, I will have to try again.

You can of course create your cross-platform application core and service code in one language (Java, or C/C++ if you want speed), creating something like a server or unix tool and just connecting to it from the GUI that you create on each desired platform using its own tools. The result is that the GUI is platform native, taking advantages of the features of the platform, and should be fairly simple to create for each desired platform. (Cocoa on Mac and .Net on windows provide rich features for the platform they are native to).

We will have to look into the robustness and matureness of such ideal solution. It should have good commercial and comunity backing and be fairly evolved right now, so as the future implementations of such tools will provide us with more than the mere LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR for all the supported platforms, but to leverege the cross-platform tools to include and adopt well-designed concepts and rich features native to the relevant platforms and distribute them cross-platform.

Only than can be cross-platform development truly viable and adoptable in great numbers.

Suggestions?

Java is certainly nice, but I've been doing just fine with Python and Qt via PyQt4 lately. I find that I get things done faster than I did in Swing or SWT, too.

So far, no platform-specific tweaks have been necessary, and Qt4 widgets look nice on different platforms. The Qt GUI builder is very nice, and using Python has enabled easy integration with some other cross-platform frameworks (notably VTK, scipy-cluster, and some SWIG-wrapped objects for interfacing with files output from a performance tool).

Note that Qt is not free unless you use it on open source projects.

As long as someone defines "platform independence" correctly, Java is the best.

Some people argue that C# is the best, but those people seem to misunderstand the term "platform independence" ;)

Note: I refer to the fact that C# is ported to Linux/Unixes only as long as Microsoft and Novel keep up their treaty. The community itself would never be able to maintain such huge platform as .NET