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GUI with C++
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I wanted to explore and know about the GUI toolkits available to be used with C or C++.
I heard a bit about Qt, GTK, Mingw etc, and there's MFC too.
For the moment I am not quite sure which one to start with. Does a programmer need to know all of them? Which one do you pros use mostly in real life? Is one more important to know than the other?
Could anyone tell me about GUI in C++ in general and the toolkits/libraries available?
I heard a bit about Qt, GTK, Mingw etc, and there's MFC too.
For the moment I am not quite sure which one to start with. Does a programmer need to know all of them? Which one do you pros use mostly in real life? Is one more important to know than the other?
Could anyone tell me about GUI in C++ in general and the toolkits/libraries available?
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Join Date: Aug 2005
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depends on the operating system. QT is portable between both *nix and MS-Windows. The others are not portable. I'm not a *nix programmer, so I can only say that on MS-Windows the Visual Studio .NET 2003 (2005 coming out this month) are the best. But again, it is not portable to other operating systems. You might also check Borland products.
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Junior Poster in Training
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Originally Posted by Asif_NSU
I wanted to explore and know about the GUI toolkits available to be used with C or C++.
I heard a bit about Qt, GTK, Mingw etc, and there's MFC too.
For the moment I am not quite sure which one to start with. Does a programmer need to know all of them? Which one do you pros use mostly in real life? Is one more important to know than the other?
Could anyone tell me about GUI in C++ in general and the toolkits/libraries available?
Gtk is really good, Gtkmm (the C++ 'version' of Gtk) is excellent, and I use it a lot when developing on Linux. I haven't even tried to set up gtk on Windows, but I hear it is a lot of work.
ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.8/win32/
FLTK (fulltick) is what I use for cross platform GUIs. It has its problems, but it is *extremely* easy to get running on any platform, and your code should be very portable. If I am doing stuff with OpenGL I use FLTK, there is a lot less work involved in getting things up and running with it than there are with Gtkmm. The two are actually really similar, and if you can learn one then you will be very quick to learn the other.
www.fltk.org
I hear Qt is pretty spiffy. I haven't tried it too much myself, so I can't give an opinion on it.
-Fredric
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My main beef with MFC is its resource editor
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Originally Posted by Ancient Dragon
MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class) doesn't have such a thing as a resource editor. MFC is a library of functions, not a compiler or IDE.
-Fredric
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what don't you like about it? just calling something "a piece of junk" is not very helpful. Do you have a better resource editor in mind? That's my opinion of QT too, but that doesn't mean it is no good -- it only shows my inexperience with the product.
Doesn't do bitmaps very well, but you can use other pait programs to create *.bmp files then import them into VC++ 6.0 project.
Doesn't do bitmaps very well, but you can use other pait programs to create *.bmp files then import them into VC++ 6.0 project.
I sort of stumbled upon this:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconVall...4/guitool.html
It says Qt is the best.
Could anyone tell me what is the relation between Qt and MinGW?
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconVall...4/guitool.html
It says Qt is the best.
Could anyone tell me what is the relation between Qt and MinGW?
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In my opinion, if you can sit down in a simple text editor, and without looking at any notes, write out the code for a simple application, then you are using the right libraries for the job. If you have to constantly look things up in a help menu or go to online tutorials, then you are using the wrong libraries for the job. If you can't write code that is self documenting, and understandable to someone who isn't familiar with the user interface that you are working with then that user interface is bad, and should not be used. In my experience this has been the doom of many projects that I have worked on with other people. They don't understand that 1000 lines of...
...is going to completely ruin your day when a bug appears. Why? Because this code is not expected in the middle of a supposedly object oriented program, it is not intuitive what is going on here, or why you are doing it.
Going further, if you ever want to change the way a control looks, you wind up with code that looks something like this:
What was that? NMCUSTOMDRAW? LPNMCUSTOMDRAW? CDRF_NOTIFYITEMDRAW? I don't know what that means without a walk over to www.msdn.com, I've looked them up before but for some reason long lists of random capital letters don't stick in my head too well, and they shouldn't have to. Let's have a look at this superior product's documentation, shall we? Here is the opening to the NMCUSTOMDRAW documentation at msdn:
Jeez, thanks Bill. That's some informative stuff you got there. I really enjoy wasting 99% of development time going through infinite loops of long random capital random letters.
-Fredric
C++ Syntax (Toggle Plain Text)
...is going to completely ruin your day when a bug appears. Why? Because this code is not expected in the middle of a supposedly object oriented program, it is not intuitive what is going on here, or why you are doing it.
Going further, if you ever want to change the way a control looks, you wind up with code that looks something like this:
C++ Syntax (Toggle Plain Text)
What was that? NMCUSTOMDRAW? LPNMCUSTOMDRAW? CDRF_NOTIFYITEMDRAW? I don't know what that means without a walk over to www.msdn.com, I've looked them up before but for some reason long lists of random capital letters don't stick in my head too well, and they shouldn't have to. Let's have a look at this superior product's documentation, shall we? Here is the opening to the NMCUSTOMDRAW documentation at msdn:
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NMCUSTOMDRAW Structure
Contains information specific to an NM_CUSTOMDRAW notification message.
Syntax
typedef struct tagNMCUSTOMDRAWINFO {
NMHDR hdr;
DWORD dwDrawStage;
HDC hdc;
RECT rc;
DWORD_PTR dwItemSpec;
UINT uItemState;
LPARAM lItemlParam;
} NMCUSTOMDRAW, *LPNMCUSTOMDRAW;
-Fredric
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I have worked with MFC for sometime and then started Windows Programming with the pure C/C++ Code and the Win32 APIs. After that much of the things that were not clear in MFC became easier to understand.
All Win32 and MFC does is handle the Various Windows messages under some Event Handling Function. Once you get to know these events, the names given to the handler functions become clear, and you will see that the names are not that random as it initially seems.
For Example - The Prefix NM will denote Notification Message.
WM = Window Message
TVN_KEYDOWN is a specific window message sent from the TreeView ( Hence the Prefix TV ) and since this is of the form of a WM_NOTIFY Message, the Prefix is TVN. A Programmer who has spent some time in Win32 will know that this notifies when a User presses a key when the TreeView Control has input focus.
Similary if you look up the documentation for NM_CUSTOMDRAW you will understand what are the parameters that are passed in he NMCUSTOMDRAW structure. All depends on what you are conversant with.
Yeah in a way I agree with Daishi in that MFC is not that well structured. But this is not due to its resource editor, but the way it generates the Code. I however think that this can be cleared up to some extent if you did some pure Win32 API Programming.
I dont see why it is bad to refer documentation all the time. While we can get a rough idea of the Events that are to be used just by looking at them, with so many APIs in the Win32 Library and the MFC Libraries, I dont see how can one memorize all of them with all the parameters and such. And again I think ( IMHO )that the Win32 API is very well documented. Microsoft products are not that bad as it is said to be. :cheesy: But these views are very much dependent on the amount of practice you have on the specific library so no hard and fast rule as such.
All Win32 and MFC does is handle the Various Windows messages under some Event Handling Function. Once you get to know these events, the names given to the handler functions become clear, and you will see that the names are not that random as it initially seems.
For Example - The Prefix NM will denote Notification Message.
WM = Window Message
TVN_KEYDOWN is a specific window message sent from the TreeView ( Hence the Prefix TV ) and since this is of the form of a WM_NOTIFY Message, the Prefix is TVN. A Programmer who has spent some time in Win32 will know that this notifies when a User presses a key when the TreeView Control has input focus.
Similary if you look up the documentation for NM_CUSTOMDRAW you will understand what are the parameters that are passed in he NMCUSTOMDRAW structure. All depends on what you are conversant with.
Yeah in a way I agree with Daishi in that MFC is not that well structured. But this is not due to its resource editor, but the way it generates the Code. I however think that this can be cleared up to some extent if you did some pure Win32 API Programming.
I dont see why it is bad to refer documentation all the time. While we can get a rough idea of the Events that are to be used just by looking at them, with so many APIs in the Win32 Library and the MFC Libraries, I dont see how can one memorize all of them with all the parameters and such. And again I think ( IMHO )that the Win32 API is very well documented. Microsoft products are not that bad as it is said to be. :cheesy: But these views are very much dependent on the amount of practice you have on the specific library so no hard and fast rule as such.
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Originally Posted by Daishi
In my opinion, if you can sit down in a simple text editor, and without looking at any notes, write out the code for a simple application, then you are using the right libraries for the job. If you have to constantly look things up in a help menu or go to online tutorials, then you are using the wrong libraries for the job.
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