In his blog, Aaron Siego reveals that in Q1 2006 Trolltech is going to release a technical preview of officially supported Java bindings for Qt 4, and that Qt 4.1 has built-in SVG support and PDF generation.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Gtk is, unfortunately, less mature on Windows.
I'm not being negative about the GTK Windows people here, but it just flat-out isn't up to the job. It needs a lot of investment as any sort of cross-platform toolkit. Where that investment comes from is anybody's guess.....
Likewise, SWT just doesn't completely match the look-and-feel of a Gtk/Gnome desktop.
Well it primarily uses GTK on Unix/Linux platforms, so it is in a fashion, but my God, SWT is absolutely unusable on anything but Windows - and basically enables Java for Windows. James Gosling was right there. However, Swing suffers problems coming from the other direction. At some point before the next ice age they'll realise Trolltech's approach to it is totally correct.
Trolltech really did their homework when they decided on the best way to do a cross-platform graphical toolkit and what to compromise on. You still get people even today who think it's a good idea to support every native widget on every platform out there, or who have a completely alien looking graphical toolkit and don't know what to do about it or people who get their kicks subclassing until the end of eternity using wxWidgets.
if they can appeal to some of the newer developers that are unfamiliar with unmanaged code
Managed code doesn't matter - all you say is 'Java'. It's possible to compile Java to native code (and people have used VB for years) and it doesn't make a blind bit of difference to developers. Managed code buys you certain things in terms of security and managability on the server side, but I really don't know where this universal 'managed code' hype came from. On the client managed code of all kinds is simply terribly slow, consumes an awful lot more memory for absolutely no gain whatsoever (Mono anyone?) and when you run your .Net app on Windows it uses a lot of native libraries and code to make it somewhere near usable.
Member since:> SWT is absolutely unusable on anything but Windows
As an SWT software writer, I disagree.
The latest versions are getting there. Not everything is perfect, but what toolset is?
SWT is not perfect, but it is advancing fast enough for me to see a promissing future for it.
Member since:
2005-07-18
Well no, because Swing and SWT can't cut it. You'll find very few Java client apps in companies now, and even less talk about them. They have their place, but having a sane development toolkit allied to a language that has a lot of traction in the corporate world (rightly or wrongly) is a big plus. I think Trolltech have hugely underestimated this. If they can bring their excellent development technology to the Java world (client and server side) they've got a whole market they didn't have before.
You might think it changes nothing, but for Trolltech and Qt it does.
Thank you! Finally someone realizes it... the aforementioned ideas that apparently nullify Trolltech's technology all are missing something. Gtk is, unfortunately, less mature on Windows. Likewise, SWT just doesn't completely match the look-and-feel of a Gtk/Gnome desktop.
Everyone already knows that Qt is great as a cross-platform toolkit- if they can appeal to some of the newer developers that are unfamiliar with unmanaged code, they might be in luck.
-Mark