http://www.osnews.com/story/17192/Qt_Jambi_Beta_Now_Available Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:40:31 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?210236 http://osnews.com/thread?210236 I like both Swing and SWT. However, when I compare them to regular Win32, GTK+, QT, or Windows.Forms (in .Net), or GTK# (for Mono), they both leave me less than satisfied.

With Java 6, Swing has improved immensely. LnF is a bit better, load times are a bit shorter, and finally, finally, finally, it supports anti-aliasing fonts. But still, Java Swing apps tend to be the biggest memory hogs of all the aforementioned toolkits, and the LnF is quite inconsistent, and still looking a bit alien to the native environment.

SWT/Eclipse RCP are nice alternatives. However, Eclipse, as powerful as it is, is quite complex, and presents a steep learning curve (in comparison to other IDEs). And SWT is buggy and inconsistent - putting Java wrappers on top of various native environments, and presenting them as a consistent API, is a very difficult, complex task, and very difficult to maintain. It looks and feels much more fitting in the native environment, but it's best on Windows, okay on Gnome/GTK, and lousy on Mac.

Therefore, IMHO, Java GUI is really best off simply interfacing with cross platform native GUIs, namely QT and GTK.

Unfortunately, the Java-Gnome project hasn't really caught on. It has the same potential as Mono with GTK#, but it's barely used.

So perhaps QT-Jambi could get some attention. QT is a wonderful cross platform tool kit, that both looks great (and blends/behaves with the native environment), and it's quite fast/efficient. Java could really use this. Wed, 07 Feb 2007 20:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (JeffS) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?210263 http://osnews.com/thread?210263 it would be neat if they provided a qt awt implementation and finally a qt swing plaf, then it could truly be attractive to develop java gui applications. Wed, 07 Feb 2007 21:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Redeeman) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?210281 http://osnews.com/thread?210281 Jambi could well become very important for Qt and Trolltech. One of the shortcomings of using Qt and C++ is when you want to develop client/server applications with the same language, framework and environment.

Some time ago I did one of those online presentation and demonstration things with some Trolltech people, and although it's a great rich client framework, Qt falls a bit short when you want to do the sorts of client/server things people do with Visual Basic and .Net or Java under one umbrella. It was something I raised with them, and I'm sure their customers have raised it to.

If they can make client/server Java development easier to use than it is now, possibly using DBUS is one idea, then they could do very well out of it. Companies out there spend a lot of money on Java. Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (segedunum) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?210294 http://osnews.com/thread?210294 Qt is as of now dually licensed under a proprietary licence and the GPLv2.

Does anyone know how Trolltech looks at the upcomming GPLv3? Have they issued an official statement about this as of yet?

Qt going GPLv3 would be a _major_ boost to the number of apps also going the v3 route. Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (drynwhyl) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?210306 http://osnews.com/thread?210306 Jambi is a province in Indonesia. After Java (main island) and Jakarta (capital city), now Jambi. Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Babi Asu) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?210381 http://osnews.com/thread?210381 Jambi could well become very important for Qt and Trolltech. One of the shortcomings of using Qt and C++ is when you want to develop client/server applications with the same language, framework and environment.

Actually this works pretty well using Qt and C++.

I have been working on such architectures for about 5 years now, client systems ranging from Windows2000/XP to Linux, server systems from Linux to True64 and Solaris.

Using QDataStream one can easily cross Endianess or processor architecture borders without rewriting any communication code.

With the separation of functional area in Qt4, this will even be improved Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (anda_skoa) Comments