As you might know, my CSSTint (see my sig) uses wxWidgets, and is currently Windows-only. It was a bit of a let down, when I tried to compile it on Linux. It would compile only after several code changes, and even then the main view is broken, since the ListView cannot be customed like in Windows. So the Linux build is quite unusable.

Now, it would be probably fixable, but somehow I've been thinking of rewriting the whole thing for the sake of learning and interesting experience. The current wxWidgets version is IMHO very usable, so I'm targeting only Linux (+ MacOS X maybe) here. Naturally it doesn't hurt if the rewritten thing runs in Windows as well.

I've been thinking of three approaches:

1. Write for Mono/GTK# using MonoDevelop as the IDE (it has an UI designer, which would help - I wrote the wx version without any)

2. Write for Java using Eclipse (no UI designer, unless there's a plugin..?)

3. Write for native GTK (could use a lot of my existing non-UI related C++ code)

So, I'd like to hear some opinions and comments. Am I out of my mind (it's quite a big ordeal, rewriting the whole thing, I know)? If you had to rewrite that kind of program, what language/platform would you target for?

Any other tips, e.g. if you'd choose Java for this, what component you'd use for the main color list? In wx I used a ListView in detail mode, where I just painted the color column differently. Now I think the best way would be to use a table, where you can have different cell-renderers, so doing the color column would be a matter of implementing a cell-renderer that renders a rounded box for the background.

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Also, if I start doing this, I could write a blog of some kind of the "porting" progress. I think it'd be interesting to read later on, but I don't know if anybody else would want to read it. Discuss, please. I appreciate any input on this, I'm not even sure if I want to do it or not.

Yeah, Mono + GTK seems like a good choice to me at this point. I haven't really used Python, C# fits better into my way of programming. But then the Java option also interest me, and Eclipse's just great.. Choices, choices..

I'd go with Qt personally. Its a much better cross platform API than gtk will ever be. (mono and wx are gtk based)

Its good enough that Nokia, a company that was committed to doing their own software and toolkits for devices had a radical switch recently and acquired TrollTech, the creator of Qt, and explicitly asked them to teach Nokia how to make cross platform phone AND computer software. Also, Qt, and not Qtopia (embedded version of Qt) will be the toolkit for a couple of Nokia's higher end platforms soon.

Also note that Qt isn't just a GUI toolkit, its a platform toolkit. You code to Qt, not "windows, unix or osx", so theres rarely and special code for any of the platforms you're targeting. Just pure Qt api calls. Makes things easy to maintain.

If you choose Qt, go Qt4. Specifically 4.4 if you can.

QtJAmbi

Qt handles most of the memory management for its own classes. Once you create a QObject based object and add it to a parent QObject, the parent takes charge of the object.

Generally the only memory management I need to do in many Qt projects is the initial:
MyApp *app = new MyApp(...); ... delete app;

Anything more complex can use Qt's container types and fancy Database access classes, and still not require too much memory management.

I'd like to recommend QT over GTK+ for the simple reason that QT uses the native widgets of the platform it's compiled for, whereas GTK+ does all it's drawing for itself, on the CPU. Making it slower on some OSs, and making GTK+ apps always look slightly out of place.

SWT has an awkward programming model. it is really a step backwards. unless you're really begging for a more native-like user interface, it is not worth it (swing looks perfectly native on mac and linux).

you'll find distributing the code easier to achieve with java than with python or C#. the latter have portability problems in practice. then there is always the speed...

No no, I don't like web applications..

I've been playing a bit with QT Jambi in Eclipse. Seems to work quite nicely, although I've been doing just Hello Worlds for now.