Why GTK+ will prevail, and what needs to be done

[Kevin Krammer]

On Saturday 29 January 2005 05:13, Taylor Byrnes wrote:
> I see alot of valid points, however I see a few roblems remaining.
> Although some people directly port their programs many for various
> reasons maintain different codebases on Linux, one good example is
> RealPlayer, which also happens to use GTK. It is an example of what I
> mean, a progam I would like to use Qt but doesn't and isn't lkely to.

Well the free Helix client could, i.e. one could write a Qt based GUI for it.

Anyway, it is a good example.
If for some reason moving your Windows product to Qt isn't possible, you loose 
the main advantage of Qt - sharing codebases across platforms.

Qt is mostly interesting for companies that are really into crossplatform, 
i.e. they want to release their software on all platforms with the same 
features in the same version at the same time.

They need fewer developers than companies having teams for each platform and I 
guess that saves a lot more money than the respective Qt licences cost.

> For new developers of commercial software having a free Qt would be
> another incentive to use it.

Certainly, getting something gratis is logically cheaper than paying for it :)

But Trolltech is very flexible in this case, one can apply for some kind of 
delayed payment program, where you can start developmen without upfront costs 
and pay for the Qt licences ideally after you started selling your product.

And after all you are not buying something unknown, you can get a feel for the 
API and its possibilities by using the free version and nicely evalute if Qt 
offers the things you need.

> As for C/C++ diferences, both toolkits have bindings for multiple
> languages.

True, but I think other than the script language bindings most are little 
used.
Do you know about a project actually using gtkmm?

> As for the many toolkits, yes there are, the man office UI (toolars)
> aren't standard windows however all the options dialogs and popups do
> use Microsofts standard widgets.

Hmm, so you will have mixed widgets sets in one application?
Old styled buttons in your own windows and XP styled buttons in system 
dialogs?
Does sound even more confusing.

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer <kevin.krammer at gmx.at>
Qt/KDE Developer, Debian User
www.mrunix.de - German Unix/Linux programming forum
www.qtforum.org - Qt programming forum
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