[mdlug] OT: Cross-platform GUI suggestions

[David Lee Lambert]

+1 for Java.

There used to be an OK drag-and-drop editor in NetBeans,  although it was
clunky on the hardware I had at the time.  I haven't used it in a while,
and I imagine any big or commercial application would soon outgrow the
confines of the GUI's drag-and-drop code generator.

IBM's Rational Application Developer (an expensive commercial product, based
on Eclipse; I use it on the job; by the way IBM is hiring programmers in
Lansing) has a "visual editor" for drag-and-drop code generation, but the
"visual editor" only barely works some of the time.  I wouldn't recommend it
as anything other than a learning tool.

MyEclipse claims to have a visual code-builder in their shareware add-on to
Eclipse,  but I haven't used that part of it.

Java Swing is easy enough to code by hand once you get the hang of it,  and
the Java tutorials on Sun's (now Oracle's) website are pretty good.  The one
third-party piece of code I would recommend is "RiverLayout",  if you can
find that;  it made making a well-behaved dialog-box a lot easier.

If you prefer perl to Java,  you could try perl/Tk;  but I don't know how
well that works on the Mac.

--
DLL

On 26 August 2010 10:57, Clinton V. Weiss <cvweiss at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've written a few commercial apps with extensive GUI use in Java.
>  However,
> this was about 5 years ago when JBuilder was strong and had it's awesome
> GUI
> editor.  Today, I have yet to find a (free) Java GUI editor that can
> compare
> to JBuilder's, so while you'll have excellent cross-platform compatibility
> with Look and Feel that will easily match the system you're running on,
> learning to do this from scratch will be difficult.
>
> Clinton
>
> --
> Clinton V. Weiss
> cvweiss at gmail.com
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