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I'm making desktop application for my own use.
I can't decide on whcih language/toolkit/framework to use.
I would like a good User experience and a not so bad Performance.
The choices in my mind are:
wxPython
Titanium
Adobe AIR
any other suggestions that would fit
-- EDIT
I would also like it to be cross-platform
Experience, I've got some experience in Java, Python, HTML/JS. (Haven't done much .net stuff).
I would live to learn if needed.
There are a lot of other considerations.
What platform? What OS? What level of backward compatibility? What runtimes are on the clients?
What sort of graphics support do you need? 3D? 2D?
What kind of interoperability do you need?
What are your deployment scenarios?
What languages do you want to write this in?
There are literally hundreds of technologies out there. You can only come up with a design when you have specified what your main constraints are.
The first thing I'll say is that I would favour Web applications where possible. Of course for many things you can't—Web browsers for example. :) But where you can you should. Sure you have cross-browser issues but the OS/library cost of a desktop app is really high now.
That being said, if what you're doing needs to be done as a desktop app or you simply want to do it that way as a personal preference I would choose:
.Net (C# or VB.NET) if you only need to run on Windows or
Java (Swing, SWT, etc) if you want to run on non-Windows platforms.
I would choose from these two for no other reason than they're the most proven. Sure there are other options Adobe Air, Python, etc. Python in particular has real apps written in it so it would be my third choice. Overall though, these stacks are just less proven for this particular task.
depending on your desktop OS. For Windows, you may get Microsoft Visual Studio Express Edition of C# or VB.Net. For Mac computer intel based computer, you have free XCODE available to do it or use JavaScript to build widget applications.
Another option to look at would be QT. It's a cross platform C++ framework with Java & Python Bindings. It really does boil down to what type of application you want to build though and which platform(s) you want to target it at. If you're aiming at Windows specifically, you might want to consider using .NET and C# to take advantage of native support, on OSX, Objective-C and Cocoa, or on Linux C/C++ & whichever API set your targeted distro uses. And for cross-platform, which platforms would you like to target? Windows? OSX? Linux (Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora etc.)? That will also dictate your choice.
Try Flexonrails
then convert with adobeAir
:)
it will be good
im doing my desktop application with that
Depending on what skills and tools you have available to you, as others have pointed out.
If you're on windows one simple accessable option is HTA applications.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496(VS.85).aspx
if you're on a mac, dashcode is a similar option for, not just authoring widgets, but also full on web applications.
both options give you access to many more api's than typical javascript has access to, such as filesystem access, or the ability to execute system commands.
There's a zillion others, but those options come for for free with their respective operating systems.
Dependes on what kind of application you would like to build, but you definitely should put in your list of tools to evaluate (at least) Delphi.
It compiles to native win32, is a rapid application development tool and has support for a lot of areas like databases, internet, com and many many others. Also, is built into Object Pascal, a very simple to learn language.
Up to some point, you can make it's applications cross platform using others IDEs like Lazarus in Linux.
As of 20 march-2018 almost everything has shifted to javascript. Have a look at Electron.js . Its usefull to build cross platform desktop apps in javascript , html and css.
Related
First off, greetings everyone and thank you for your interest in my question.
I'm currently working at a mobile startup. Our product is a communication app for Android, iOS and BlackBerry devices and we're looking to expand onto some Nokia platforms.
I don't know a lot about Symbian details as I've never actually programmed in the platform before but this is all of the information I was able to gather.
The platforms to support are Symbian S60, Symbian^3 / Symbian "Anna", Maemo + Meego.
In order to accomplish this, there's several tools at our disposal but we're not sure which ones to use.
Nokia Qt appears to be unsupported on Symbian S40 devices (we seem to be stuck with J2ME) and Symbian S60 devices pre-3rd Edition Feature Pack 1
On Symbian's C++ we can't rely on C++'s STL. This means that we can either create two versions of the same software or create our own STL that's compatible with Symbian (I'd like to avoid that).
Approach
Among the team the consensus seems to be to split this into two logical chunks:
Core business logic + libraries in C++
Device specific UI branches using Qt or native UI tools
With all this information in mind, I ask:
What is the general approach for this problem? Is there any considerable flaws with the one mentioned, namely incompatibility or inconsistencies with Qt on older platforms?
What pitfalls should we avoid to ensure compatibility and performance of the app across all Nokia devices listed?
Is there a way to get around Symbian's C++ limitation of the STL? Can we bundle the Qt sources somehow?
Suggestions and other approaches are welcome. Thank you for all your feedback.
You should consider that Symbian is a dying platform, so I would not invest huge development effort into a Symbian application. And even more so I would not use Symbian C++. Qt is a promising platform but Nokia/Microsoft announced that there will be no Qt port for Windows phone (which might be interesting for you).
Maybe you should support Nokia devices only by Java ME because Symbian has big market share but the most devices are not smartphones where you can run a Qt app.
Your approach sounds very idealized, but I am not sure if you can use the C++ libraries you mentioned for the business logic from Java ME. Is that possible?
There are STL implementations that are possible to use on Symbian.
I was once part of a team hat used a C++ core (with STL) on Symbian devices ranging from S60v1 to S60v5 as well as UIQ, S80 and S90. The same core was also used on windows mobile.
We used STLPort for the STL implementation, but I have been unable to find that specific version again. I do believe there are other Symbian STL implementations out there.
On the other hand S60 device have a very competent J2ME runtime, so if you have to develop a J2ME app for S40 devices you might as well use it on S60 as well.
I am not more experiences as you but according to me Qt is good for Application development.Write code once to target multiple platforms
Qt allows you to write advanced applications and UIs once, and deploy them across desktop and embedded operating systems without rewriting the source code saving time and development cost.
Thanks
Is Qt an interesting platform for business apps development, outside of Nokia phones ?
Why ? Strong points ?
Thanks
I like Qt because:
Very well-designed framework, e.g. signal-slot, model-view, graphics view/scene/item/proxy, painter/paint device/paint engine..., too many to be listed here!
Excellent documentation!
Cross platform language/API, as well as tools like UI designer, creator, and so on.
Rich features, e.g. graphics framework, network library, database engine, and so on.
Active community, and active development.
There should be more. If you have ever used it, you'll find it's easy to build your framework upon Qt.
I didn't have any complain to Qt. If I have to say at least one disadvantage here, "convention". You must adopt the convention of Qt, e.g. You have to use moc to make the meta object of your objects, and it's easier for developers to use Qt's vector, list, auto_ptr than STL, tr1. But I never found any issue caused by that. On the contrary, it works very well.
In my opinion, Qt is the state-of-the-art C++ framework in this modern world!
P.S. There are a lot of commercial applications built on Qt. You can find it under Qt's official website. But I'd like add one more here: Perforce, one of the top commercial source code management tools, built its client tool on Qt for Windows/Linux/Mac.
yes it is .. just look at kde apps :)
or see more applications made by qt
and it has alot of bindings in many languages
Documentation
cross-Platform IDE
further reading
may be this is not so related to the question ... but my first deal with qt was just great starting from their well organized Documentation to their great widgets
the GraphicsView is just ammazing ! :)
It's about the only current/modern C++ gui library on Windows.
MFC is so old you have to write comments in Latin
WTL would be nice if they had finished it before abandoning it.
Winforms/WPF + managed C++/CLR - all the fun of several incompatible new technologies at once.
Bad points:
To fit on lots of platforms they have invented their own solutions to things that are now in the STL/Boost
The signal/slot mechanism - tricky to debug and silently fails (with no error) with simple typos.
Although everything is possible it's sometimes a lot of effort to do simple things (they do love MVC) compared to Winforms.
Qt is simple
Qt is powerful
Qt is NATIVELY-CROSS-PLATFORM
Qt is REALLY-CROSS-PLATFORM
Qt is comprehensive (but the Media side of it still needs to grow)
Qt doesn't require Garbage Collection, but it embeds a GREAT model of memory management that makes you forget about memory deallocation
Qt is solid
Qt is modern
Qt proposes some new paradigm of programming that are really good (Signals-Slots)
Qt runs a lot of VERY successful software: (Skype, Google Earth...)
Are those points strong enough?
Maybe you have heard about Google Earth which happens to be programmed in Qt too.
That aside, I like Qt for my in-house development because it
is very well supported and documented,
allows me to write simple and decent-looking apps that are
works cross-platform for Windows and Linux with little effort, and
contains nice to have components for database access, regexps, guis, xml, ...
I also use the Qwt widgets for easy real-time plotting on top of Qt.
I really dont understand whats the point in underestimating tools/frameworks which makes things easy for programmers. Qt is too good for GUI development, I would say its much better than any current existing crossplatform app development suite.
So many advantages, I have been using it for more than three years now for a product to be deployed in Linux/Win environments. The app is thread intensive and initially we had a tough time using pthreads and its conterpart for windows. Then we switched to Qt(and QThreads eventually) and things were a breeze...
Backed by active development, a highly helpful and supportive community along with excellent documentation, training, certification programs, videos, forums... its easy, fast and effective to develop in Qt. You should see the video which they create a web browser in just five mins!
Its really 'cross platform', and it doesnt have a software wrapper(like Java does) to enable this which makes it faster. Cmon, we all know java apps have buttons which takes a second to respond to even a simple 'click'.
I hope Qt will someday do a take on Java. :D
after all, 350000 developers cant be wrong when they chose Qt.
Pixar uses Qt (or at least, used, as of 2005) internally for certain parts of their tool suite (called "Marionette" in the marketing) collectively called Menv, ("men-vee" for Modelling ENVironment)---at least for their lighting sub-tool Lumos.
Just in general terms, for a noobie. I apparently need an 'SDK' to install something; what is this?
An SDK is a set of libraries which hold reusable code that you in turn use to develop applications. Whether those applications will run in Windows, on an XBOX, and iPhone, in a Flash application, etc. determine what SDK you should be using.
Take the iPhone for example. To write an iPhone application, you write code in a language called Objective-C (which looks and feels just like C, but with Smalltalk's object-model). Anyway, every time you write an app, you don't need to rewrite the code that draws text on the actual screen or registers the actual screen-touches. Instead, Apple provides the code that all application developers will need to do simple things.
Likewise, if you're writing for Windows, there are libraries to do things like draw an actual window, or connect to the network stack.
All of these common libraries, along with some other tools, make up an SDK.
For C++, you will probably see a lot of mention of Boost. This is not an SDK, but rather a set of libraries that contain code that a lot of other developers find useful.
What platform are you trying to write for? Are you just getting into C++ in Windows and looking to get started? Are you trying to write a game for some console?
"Software Development Kit" - a set of tools and libraries that let you develop software.
An example would be the iPhone SDK, which lets you develop software for the iPhone.
An SDK for a given product in general includes what you need to create an interface or an application based on that product. That's why "software development kit", a set of things needed to build software. It is strange though that an SDK is necessary for an install, could you provide more details?
An SDK is a tool kit that helps you develop software for a certain platform.
Help us out with some context! We might just be able to get you the correct SDK.
The OP indicates that the SDK is needed to install software. If this is the case, then maybe the OP is really asking is "Why is an SDK needed to install software, given that I am not developing (compiling) software?"
The OP tagged the question with SDK, which provides a definition and if the OP took the time write the question, the OP would in all likeliness Google SDK.
I suspect this is a case where moderators could have helped the OP to refine the question.
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I've noticed that chinese mobile phones became very popular, perhaps because of their very reasonable price and many modern features (touch screens, advanced multimedia, double sim cards etc).
I'm wondering if there's any way to develop custom solutions for this handsets as independent developer? How to obtain a toolkit and documentation?
I've found some resources, but mainly inconsistent tech notes, often in chinese only. For now I know, that majority of chinese handsets are based on chips from MediaTek (MTK), with operating system based on Nucleus RTOS and MMI (plutoMMI?) framework. Unfortunately, there is no Java RE avaiable (ok, there are some handsets with Java, however, Java isn't something I'm looking for)
Is there any SDK, documentation, emulators/simulators, how-tos, etc avaiable? How to develop, deploy and test custom application for MTK mobile?
I am enginner at design company. I have MTK development platform for MT series mobiles with English explanation. The original release and manuals are written in English(About 300mb pdf files). The SDK have simulator written in Visual C++. MMI interface working under nucleus rtos os. The codes are V++.
The MTK service is charged. You need to contact them and pay for the chip, software SDK, document, and technical support.
I don't know where you get the "some resource", but it must be leaked by some customer of their, thus using these resource will be considered as illegal.
I work with a lot of Chinese mobile phone manufacturers because we export mobile phones from China. I'm really interested in building a new applications, especially an email program, for these MTK based devices. Now it's a bit late to be looking at the 6225 platform because the 6235 platform seems to be where we'll see the most growth moving forward. The major differences that I'm aware of between the 6235 and 6225 are that 6235 supports Wi-Fi, works with EDGE, and is faster.
Steve, you mentioned the G2. I think that Android will be the breakout OS for Chinese phone manufacturing. Once their local engineers and designers get a handle on it a plethora of both ridiculous and useful applications and models will flourish and there won't be major export (customs) problems as we see now with the Windows Mobile devices (because the Chinese typically don't offer licensed software).
For platform sources this can be a starting point :
https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/downloads/nucleus-source-interest_reg
I have no real experience on RTOS, I am GNU/Linux guy
I just bought a SciPhone G2 Dream and have done some initial investigation. This particular phone runs J2ME applications but I am also wondering what can be done (if anything) with native applications. Ideally I would like to get my Bluetooth GPS to work with this phone.
This page discusses getting GCC to work with Nucleus but I'm not sure whether this is useful.
Mentor (the makers of Nucleus) have a trial version of their developer suite available. I have just requested a free trial. It is a bit concerning that the website makes no mention of the cost. They also have an emulator.
What sort of phone did you get and what sort of applications are you planning to develop?
I'm in same wagon like you, trying to select an smartphone with WIFI and available SDK, low cost (lower thatn 40$). Also contacted Mediatek without results. I can give you a piece of advice, in reality is what I'm doing now. Try to negotiate a bulk purchase with a supplier together with access to SDK and documentation. I did that before with an ARM based Thinclient and worked, but I had to buy 30 pcs.
I'm not exactly sure of what you mean by a 'Chinese' phone. However, you may be talking about ODM phones. Most of the time, these phones are system clones of regular phones with some customisation. It may be a good idea to just buy one and take it apart to see what platform it runs on. Maybe it uses OMAP or something else? In which case, you probably have more knowledge on how to proceed. Maybe it is even compatible with Linux.
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I have to choose a platform for our product. I have to decide between The Qt Framework and Adobe's AIR. I am well versed with Qt as I have worked for the last two years. I looked up at the Adobe's site but all the info about flex, flash, ability to coding in HTML/ActionScript is overwhelming and confusing. I cannot understand the following about the Adobe ecosystem.
I have the following questions on Adobe AIR:
What language do I use for coding my application? (not just defining the looks of UI)
Like in Qt I use C++. Is it Actionscript?
Can we say AIR is only for making UI's for apps.
Where is the doc for the utility classes along with AIR?
e.g. http://qt-project.org/doc/ for Qt
Qt ships with a huge set of premade widgets that one can use. Does Adobe ship with any such widget set and if so where can i see it as in url?
I understand flex SDK is open source. Can I make commerical apps and ship them ? Does flex SDK ship everything (compiler, utility classes/widgets)
How much does AIR cost in terms of licensing?
Is there something in AIR that is equivalent to QGraphicsView of QT?
If you needs to access a lot of native libraries, you'll need to stay within your QT environment. Keep in mind that AIR is single-threaded and is run on the Flash Player (something that was originally designed for frame-based animations.)
However, depending on the style of application you're building, AIR might suit you just fine.
Beware that AIR can get confusing because there's a few different developer paths to creating AIR applications: 1) using html/javascript and the AIR SDK, 2) using Flash/Actionscript and 3) using Flex SDK and/or Flex builder. The last one is the most capable as far as coming from traditional desktop development background.
Small apps that are Web 2.0 for hooking into web services are good candidates for AIR applications. Things like the IM client Digsby would be great. My favorite AIR app that I've seen thus far is Basamiq Mockups. Other useful apps are TweetDeck. These are good examples of the types of things that are well-suited to solve with AIR.
You should visit the Adobe Showcase and look at some applications: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/showcase/
Also, if you're looking to just get out of the C++ game, I believe QT has some java bindings now...also I remember some python bindings, but never look at those myself.
As far as QGraphicsView, people have done similar things in Flex. I tried Googling right now but couldn't find them initially, but people have taken things like A large image, and then only displayed a current region in the window. Also, in the next version of Flex, they're acutaly building an official ViewPort component:
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Gumbo+Viewport
Go spend some time with this AIR application and then ask yourself if Adobe Flex and AIR are worth investing your time in mastering (be prepared to ask yourself why something comparable doesn't exist for the likes of C++/QT):
Tour de Flex
Tour de Flex is a desktop application
for exploring Flex capabilities and
resources, including the core Flex
components, Adobe AIR and data
integration, as well as a variety of
third-party components, effects,
skins, and more.
Some of your questions:
Flex can be coded in MXML and
ActionScript3. AIR additionally
supports HTML/DOM/JavaScript
programming as webkit HTML render engine is built into
the AIR runtime.
MXML is an XML declarative DSL that
gets compiled into ActionScript3
imperative code. It is quite good,
though, for declaratively coding the
graphical forms of the UI (i.e., the
views of the MVC pattern).
ActionScript3 has a heratige that is
founded on JavaScript, but it has
been embelished to the point it more
resembles Java or C#. It has package
namespace, classes and interfaces
with inheritance, class member
access protection keywords,
constructors, static members, and
some very nice additions over Java:
properties, events, data-binding,
and closures.
Flex style programming is also a single-threaded model that relies on asynchronous I/O interactions. This is a simpler model to program than multi-threaded Java Swing or C# .NET Winform apps, yet permits achieving the same net results of program behavior. I elaborate on that here:
Flex Async I/O vs Java and C# Explicit Threading
Flex is open source, you can download the SDK for free, there are no licensing costs associated with it. (see their FAQ)
They do ship a 'flex builder', which is some custom Eclipse I think, and which costs money, but you can perfectly work without it.
The docs can be found at adobe's livedoc pages. (which to some, is enough reason in itself to dislike Adobe ;))
I do wonder, if you are well versed in QT, why are you considering something else? Which advantages do you expect AIR to give you over QT?
I have some experience with both QT and Flex, but not nearly enough to weight one versus the other. I do know QT/C++ is much, much more mature than Flex/ActionScript.
If you already know QT, I don't think the time spend learning a new framework (and programming language) will gain you enough to be honest...
I've used QT and Flex (not so much Air itself though) and have found that Flex is faster for getting apps up and running as well as modifying, while QT gives you more control -- particularly in the installer. The Air app installer is pretty awkward, or at least it was when I tried it, though it may have been improved since then.
The big advantage of Air is that much of the code for it can be run in Flash inside web pages. You can't access the local file system etc. from the web for security reasons but just about everything else is portable.
I made the opposite move. I started working on Adobe stuff and moved to QT. The main reason for doing it was about Adobe framework limitations. When you are using Adobe stuff, you are limited to the tools that they produce, it is hard to introduce external frameworks or libraries, if can not do what you want with Adobe stuff. Usually, the solution to do this is to use sockets, which transforms a supposed "stand-alone" application on a client-server architecture. In addition, if you are using many external stuff it can be hard to manage so many different clients.
Using QT you can code in C++ and add any external framework or lib you want. Even though, some times it can not be easy to code it, is doable and with no "strange" system architecture.
If your looking for some examples of "fun" UIs using Qt and SVG, take a look at the KDEGames [1][2] and KDEEdu [3][4] projects. There's lot's of nice code there that uses QGraphicsView and SVG to created scalable interfaces. Of course note that's it's GPL so be careful what you "borrow" if your app isn't.
[1] http://games.kde.org/
[2] http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdegames/
[3] http://edu.kde.org/
[4] http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdeedu/
I'll second #Pieter's comment - if you already know QT, moving to a whole new environment is going to take a LOT longer.
QT has the advantage of being cross-platform, and very mature: there are libraries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. I'm not extremely familiar with AIR beyond knowing it's from Adobe, but the product site seems to indicate that it's for rich internet apps (http://www.adobe.com/products/air/). If that's true, then QT would be the far better choice if you're developing a desktop application.