Re: GUI programming

Hi

we have developed a extensive linux GUi platform

HTTPS://MULI.BIZ/ABOUT-MULI/LINUX-GDK-DEVELOPMENT-PLATFORM-MBBAG/

The magic is Gnome Broadwayd a browser output in html5

Regards

---
Ronald Skeoch, MD. _Muli Management P/L_
_+61 02 94873241_     _https://www.muli.biz [1]_

On 22-05-2023 09:29, Colin Fee via linux-aus wrote:

> I can concur with Adam's advice. In my previous role I managed a small 
> team of Devs that produced software in support of medical research. To 
> ensure the widest usability across devices and OSs, they wrote hybrid 
> apps i.e. progressive web apps, in one flavour of Javascript or another 
> (React, Angular etc). When run on a mobile device you couldn't tell if 
> it was a web app.
> 
> On Mon, 22 May 2023 at 00:29, Adam Nielsen via linux-aus 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>>> What's the easiest way of doing GUI programming on Linux?  When I 
>>> Google this
>>> I get lots of results about Python programming, Python isn't a 
>>> language I like
>>> or want to learn but I wouldn't rule out using it for simple things 
>>> if it is
>>> much easier than other options.  I would prefer C/C++.
>> 
>> For C/C++ you have to pick a toolkit like Qt, GTK, wxWidgets, etc.  
>> All
>> of them have their positives and negatives, and all of them require
>> this toolkit to be installed on the system you want to run the program
>> on.  If you want to run your final program on a phone, make sure you
>> can install the toolkit on it before deciding on which one to use.
>> 
>>> What I would ideally like is a system like IBM's VisualAge for C++ on 
>>> Linux.
>>> When using VisualAge C++ on OS/2 I could write a program that had all 
>>> the
>>> basic controls and basic operations on them (EG enter text into an 
>>> entry field
>>> and click a button to have it added to a listbox) without writing any 
>>> code.
>> 
>> Most of these toolkits now have designers available that let you drag
>> and drop to develop the UI.  Some are better than others, I suspect
>> because doing GUIs in traditional languages like C++ is very tedious 
>> so
>> most developers would rather be doing something else.
>> 
>>> For writing a GUI front-end to a server I could design all the 
>>> screens
>>> graphically and then just write C code to copy data between entry 
>>> fields and
>>> API calls.  But I have the impression that no such thing exists for 
>>> Linux.
>> 
>> If you are talking about API calls then HTML and Javascript starts to 
>> be
>> a viable option, especially based on your next point.
>> 
>>> What I want to do is move many of the things I do on my laptop to a 
>>> phone and
>>> that requires less use of the command-line.  So shell scripts need to 
>>> be
>>> replaced with GUI operations and ssh to run commands on a server 
>>> needs to be
>>> replaced by API use or parsing ssh output for GUI display.
>> 
>> If you're going to run on a phone then it probably has a web browser,
>> so making a web page in Javascript is likely going to give you the
>> least painful result.
>> 
>> A web app means you can run on pretty much any mobile device, tablet,
>> computer, etc.  If you use C++ and a toolkit, it will be difficult to
>> run on iOS or Android devices as these have different toolkits to a
>> normal Linux PC - you have to actually write an iOS or Android app,
>> using whatever lanuages and toolkits the vendor supports.
>> 
>> However if you go the web route, you can write a "progressive web app"
>> which is basically static HTML and some Javascript, which thanks to a
>> few extra config files, gets run on your phone as if it's an app you
>> installed through the app store.  This means you get an icon on the
>> phone's home screen to launch the app, it runs full screen like a
>> native app, and with some additional code it can even run offline.
>> 
>> Then you just need to handle the backend (actioning API requests 
>> coming
>> from the GUI elements on the web page) which you could do in C++ if 
>> you
>> wanted, but most people stick with Javascript so the language is the
>> same in both halves of the system.  On a normal Linux machine you'd 
>> use
>> NodeJS to run the server code.  You may be able to run this on a 
>> phone,
>> or it may be more practical to run it on another machine on your
>> network.
>> 
>> I spent many years writing GUI code with C++ (on Windows and Linux) 
>> and
>> experimented with Python a bit, but once I realised how much quicker
>> GUIs are to develop as web sites, I never went back.
>> 
>> There is a lot to learn if you've never done it before, especially to
>> make a really polished dynamic app using React or similar, but one 
>> good
>> thing about this is that it doesn't take too much to get basic code up
>> and running and you can expand from there.  There are also many orders
>> of magnitude more people working on web sites than C++ GUIs, so 
>> there's
>> a lot more information out there and people who can help if you get
>> stuck.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Adam.
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> 
> --
> Colin Fee
> [email protected]
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Links:
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