Hi Jeremy, Thanks for the reply. Very good information.
Jeremy O'Donoghue wrote: > 2009/4/30 Daniel Carrera <daniel.carr...@theingots.org>: >> 1) First, a broad question: Why do you like wxHaskell? > > Well, the wxHaskell list may not be the place to get objective advice, but... For GUI toolkits, I think you can get advice that is either objective or useful, but not both. I prefer subjective-but-useful. > The company I work for has major issues with LGPL (we're flat out > forbidden to use anything LGPL, although GPL is OK in certain > circumstances), whereas wxWidgets (and hence wxHaskell) has a license > that unambiguously allows for closed source development. That's very interesting. This isn't an issue for me (my employer is happy with any FOSS license), but it's interesting anyways. > I like that it is stable, has pretty much all of the features I need > in a GUI, is easy to distribute (i.e. roll up into an installer) and > looks good on all three major platforms. The "easy to distribute" part is interesting. Is there something that makes Qt or Gtk harder to distribute? Maybe it's the license... >> 2) I've heard that wxWidgets doesn't work that well on Mac OS X, but >> looking at the screen shots, it looks very native to me. How is OS X >> support? > > To get a *really* native OS X look and feel, you will need to do a few > platform specific pieces of code, but it looks pretty good out of the > box with just a recompile. I see. Thanks. > but it is closer (out of the box) to OS X native look and > feel than either of Gtk+ or Qt IMHO. Qt too? That's interesting. I sort of assumed that Qt would be better on Mac, but I haven't checked. Later on I'll reboot into OS X and install a couple of Qt and Wx apps and see how they look. The only real problem I see with Qt is that the qtHaskell bindings are very new. It looks like a one-man project. Even if it works, one still has to think about community support and documentation. > I've never used or seriously looked at QtHaskell, so I'm not very > qualified to judge. The only comment I would make (after 15 minutes > browsing the documentation) is that it looks as though the bindings > are a fairly low level wrapper around the Qt libraries just now. I > would expect the library itself to be pretty stable, as once you get > the wrapper generating code correct, most things just work. Ok. That's good to know. I thought QtHaskell might be unstable. In any case, if I ever write a GUI app with Haskell (knock on wood) I would write at a small program with each GUI before choosing one. > There's little to choose, technically, between Gtk2Hs and wxHaskell, I > think, and any choice you make is more likely to be about the > platforms you care about most than about functionality or stability. Good to know. In the context of my job, Windows and Linux are the most important, and Mac would be nice. Currently we use web applications because that is automatically cross-platform and trivially deployed. But some users have said that they aren't always on-line, so I thought it might be nice to make a desktop alternative some day. I've also been looking for an excuse to use Haskell for something. > Pragmatically, both Gtk2Hs and wxHaskell have pretty much everything > most people would need, and more besides. There are probably more > active developers of Gtk2Hs, but both projects are actively and > enthusiastically maintained. Both also offer some higher level > syntactic sugar over the bindings to make programming a bit easier, > although in both cases it all feels a bit 'imperative' - you do all of > the GUI stuff inside a 'do', and the code is pretty reminiscent of > what you'd write in C++. > > Hope this helps, and more importantly, I hope you decide to write a > GUI application in Haskell. Thanks for the help. Very good information. Cheers, Daniel. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Register Now & Save for Velocity, the Web Performance & Operations Conference from O'Reilly Media. Velocity features a full day of expert-led, hands-on workshops and two days of sessions from industry leaders in dedicated Performance & Operations tracks. Use code vel09scf and Save an extra 15% before 5/3. http://p.sf.net/sfu/velocityconf _______________________________________________ wxhaskell-users mailing list wxhaskell-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wxhaskell-users
