Hello all,

I need to develop an application that would be used as a simulator to test various custom algorithms. As I have never embarked on this kind of work, I need some advice:

1. Which GUI library to use in Linux, GTK+ or FLTK? The simulator application needs to output various non-standard GUI widgets like time-line plots, various graphs like trees, bar charts, pie charts etc. The input from the user can also be visual, for example the user must be able to draw small circles or rectangles or arrows, drag to move these to a new location, expand/contract them etc. I guess these won’t come already built-in, meaning, I will be coding them. In such a case which of the libraries would be easier? Or is there any library that has these non-standard features already built-in?

2. C or C++? I have experience in C, however not much in C++. For the kind of application mentioned above which would offer a better, meaning, a more intuitive and flexible means of programming?

3. Does Linux have the equivalent of dll files as in Windows?

Thanks.

1. GTK2+ is probably the best widget set to use, especially if you might port things later.

2. Use whatever language you're comfortable with. I don't know the details of your requirements so I have no idea if C++ would have any particular advantage over C.

3. On GNU/Linux systems the shared libraries are *.so (shared object) These are the equivalent of the WinDuhs DLLs (dynamically linked libraries). Of course if you meant "Active X" objects, that's a different story - they're not typically used on Linux systems.

1. Don't forget QT. It's an awesome GUI development framework, and is portable too.

2. The C++ way of doing things fits quite well with GUI development, although it's a whole lot of a language to learn on short notice.

3. What pinniped said.

Once you get used to proper object orientated programming C++ offers the advantage that you can have
something that acts like a variable but contains functions inside of it.

For example to search for a word in a string (list of letters) stringName.find("word");

I would also suggest QT because it is what i am used to and the official documentation is very
good.

I suggest FLTK.

It is very light, very very fast (both at develop time and at run time),and it is really multi-platform.
Is from many years that i compile my sources, WHITOUT changing a single char, under Linux (32 and 64 bits), windows(32 and 64 bits) and AIX(64 bits). (only Makefiles must be a little different)
It has Fluid, a simple and powerful GUI editor.
And simple and powerful is the integration with OpenGl.

from http://www.fltk.org/
"FLTK is designed to be small and modular enough to be statically linked, but works fine as a shared library. FLTK also includes an excellent UI builder called FLUID that can be used to create applications in minutes."

from http://www.fltk.org/documentation.ph...tro.html#intro
"# The "core" (the "hello" program compiled & linked with a static FLTK library using gcc on a 486 and then stripped) is 114K.
# The FLUID program (which includes every widget) is 538k."

and more, don't worry about C or C++.
Fltk apis are C++, but I use to develop my applications and routines in C (also using Fluid)
they stay very well together!

Bye!
P.S. I'm sorry for my bad English.

Thanks for all the great input. I will look into QT along with wxWidgets too.

As someone mentioned, certain builders like FLTK seem to prefer C++ or object oriented style of programming and others like GTk+ seem to be Cish in nature(i could be wrong here though). I was just wondering if using C/C++ with such builders would cause any difficulties or handicaps for me.

Anyway, thanks again guys.

If you want to use gtk with C++, use the gtkmm libraries. It provides very nice class wrappers for pretty much everything in gtk.

You're not limited to C and C++. For example, QT has excellent python bindings.

<sorry for double posting>

Hello, I was following this topic and I'm also very interest in doing programs for linux, not very sophisticated though.

I'm not very experienced on programming (used to to some small things in Object Pascal - Delphi) and now I'm using linux. I'd like very much to learn C++ to make GUI apps for linux.

What do you suggest me: QT or GTK2?

I read about Qt on its official website and I reckon it's very tempting.

Regards,

Skuzye

Try both and see which fits your brain better. I prefer QT, but I think Gtk is also quite nice. Either way, C++ is an ugly language.