making a gui editor

Question

For my school project, I would like to build a gui that someone else can use to create a gui. Upon some research I saw lot of gui builders but didn't see anything along the lines of what I am looking for.

But then I did find a tutorial using C# on here

I rather create this gui editor for linux environment.

Any suggestions to where I should start? what tools I can use? Any links to any tutorials?

Any help/direction would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. I would like to add that it only needs to be very simple. like few text input fields and some button type fields that user can arrange in the order desired.

Answer 1

I would recommend that you not try to build your own GUI builder. It is a daunting task that you will not be able to accomplish as a school project. C++ is fully-compiled, which means that it lacks almost every feature that enables people to build meta-tools (like GUI editors) for it. This mainly has to do with the fact that C++ does not have runtime reflection (natively, anyway). Beyond that, there is no "one GUI toolkit and/or paradigm to rule them all." This makes your problem incredibly difficult to deal with.

So: I would recommend Qt, because it works on a ton of platforms, is easy to use and is just plain awesome. You could also look at the billions of other GUI toolkits like Gtk+, Tk, FLTK, YAAF, GLUI, dlib, CLX...

I'm aware that this does not actually answer the question. However, I do not think that the author is aware of how incredibly difficult the task he has set in front of himself is.