On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Kelly Clowers <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 01:04, Star Liu <[email protected]> wrote: >> I want to develop a cross-platform desktop software by open source >> platform and develop tools. I'm also a web developer so I'm interested >> in gecko, and know that gecko is also able to build desktop >> applications by XUL, not only display html files. But it seems gtk+ is >> the more normal way to develop desktop applications, then what's the >> superior of the two methods? thanks. > > This is off topic for this list, but since I am replying anyway... > > > GTK and QT are traditional toolkits that are use for building apps. > They are comparable to WinForms (.NET), MFC (Win), or AppKit > (OS X). > > Gecko is technically the rendering engine at the heart of XULRunner, > otherwise known as the Mozilla Platform. XUL is Mozilla's XML > User interface Language, which is used for Firefox's "Chrome" - > all the UI elements around the web page. XUL is rendered with > Gecko, just like HTML, and the UI is driven with Javascript. > > XULRunner's use of XML and Javascript might make it easier > for a Web dev to write an app, but I suspect you would have to > write some amount of C++. In any case, you would have to learn > how the JS wraps the C++ interface, which is rather different > from the DOM. > > QT is written in C++ and GTK is C with GLib/GObject. I know > you can write the bulk of a GTK program in Python; QT has > QTScript (ecmascript) and some support for Python and > Ruby, although I don't know if the majority of a QT program > can be written with any of those. > > A XULRunner program will be larger (on disk and in memory) > and slower than a GTK or QT program. A large, complex > program will suffer less from this than a small or trivial > program. > > XULRunner make the most sense if you are going to be > rendering html or doing networking with your program anyway. > > It is worth noting that QT is a very complete framework, more > so even than XULRunner, and it includes QTWebkit. In the > just released QT 4.5, the Webkit is close to the version used > in the new Safari 4 betas. > > GTK is more loosely joined, with many parts run as separate > but allied projects (e.g. Pango, the text engine), and in some > cases there are several projects that might fill a need, with > none really official. > > All three are now available under the LGPL, and QT and > Moz have some other license options. > > > I suggest you check out the sites and maybe ask some > specific questions (not "which is better") on the appropriate > forums/mailing lists and decide which is better for you. > > http://developer.mozilla.org/En/XULRunner > http://www.gtk.org/ > http://www.qtsoftware.com/ > > > Cheers, > Kelly Clowers > thank you. My task is to make a "Optical Freedom Surfaces Design Tool", for example, given a math expression for a surface, I will display the 2D/3D picture of the surface, and do some other operation around the surface. I want to make this tool by fully free software, I think gecko is not proper for my task, but I don't know how to choose between qt and gtk+.
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