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Programming IT Technology

GUI Builders For Solaris? 15

Posted by Cliff from the dialog-construction-kits dept.
Penguin_99 asks: "I was asked to create two GUI's, in Solaris, in order to compare the speed of a C++ GUI versus a Java GUI. Right now, the GUI builder of choice is Teleuse (which is made by Telesoft), however this tool is hard to use and there is little documentation for it (not to mention the company no longer supports it). I would like to know if anyone in the Slashdot community has experience with Teleuse and knows of any on-line documentation or do you know of a better GUI builder that works with Solaris?"
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GUI Builders for Solaris? More

GUI Builders for Solaris?

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  • OK, this seems kind of weird... (Score:3)

    by randombit ( 87792 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @03:36AM (#1067371) Homepage
    How exactly do you measure the 'speed' of a GUI? Generally speaking, a GUI is going to be limited in speed by how fast it gets user input, not by processing time - and if not nobody will want to use that interface. I know that C/C++ GUIs aren't like that (or I'd be using lynx right now...) and hopefully neither are Java GUIs?!?!?!? It just seems like a very strange thing to try to compare.

    That said, most common GUI libraries (GTK+, QT, and, of course, Motif) run on Solaris, since they use Xlib (GTK+) or Xt (QT?), which are available everywhere. Motif seems the obvious choice since that's the one that's 'native', so to speak, on Solaris. And there are many different Motif builders for Unix, and as I've never touched any of them, I'll leave other /.ers to recommend something specific in this area.

    However, you said C++: if you really want C++ and not C, you have several options, including GTK--, QT (which you will need to pay for depending on what you're doing), FOX (a multi platform GUI library that I've looked at but never had time to use), and there are probably several others. But OTOH if you're using a GUI builder it probably doesn't matter too much what language it's in.

    Without knowing more about your problem, I'd recommend you use either Motif and one of the many interface builders, or GTK+ and Glade.
  • Oracle Forms [oracle.com] is a GUI builder for a wide range of operating systems, it's easy to use and quite powerful.
  • You might want to check out ZAF from Zinc Software (www.zinc.com). ZAF is a C++ GUI builder that supports multiple platforms (Motif, Windows, DOS, vxWorks). I've never used it, but it has gotten favorable reviews (links to the reviews can be found at their web site).
  • There is a GUI builder shiped into DT/Motif on solaris, called dtbuilder, its not particularly wonderful, but is fine for throwing a quick user interface together.

    It compiles on any version of Dt, I used it to write a quick tool, which works on both HP-UX and Solaris.

    James
  • Tcl/TK builds relatively nice GUIs. Like Java, it is multi-platform and has lots of documentation.

  • Sun Workshop (Score:3)

    by bueller ( 100729 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @04:52AM (#1067376) Homepage
    As part of Sun's Visual Workshop product line, recently renamed Forte [Insert Language Here], there is their C++ development environment [sun.com] consisting of compilers, debuggers, profilers, version control, and a GUI builder. Even better, the GUI builder will output Java or C++ code. The compilers are optimised for SPARC and the results are worthwhile (Sun have to do something to justify the expense).

    Better yet, to help with your eval you can do a 'try and buy', but you better have a good net connection because the download is huge.

    It is actively supported by Sun, although updates come in fits and starts - over 2 years between version 3 and version 5 (no version 4), and a year later version 6.

    I'd be interested to know how you go. The Java GUI should run slightly slower.

  • What toolkit? Seen KDevelop? (Score:3)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @05:01AM (#1067377)
    As noted above, there are a few for Motif, if Motif's what you want to use, and it's more or less the Solaris default, given their use of the CDE.

    Some offbeat alternatives that go beyond or sidestep the sort of standalone GUI-builder you sound like you're looking for would be:
    • A Tk frontend, built with the free Visual Tcl (not to be confused with the other 3 or 4 products called Visual Tcl)
    • GTK+. If you're prepared to require GTK+ on the deployment systems, or build static binaries, there's a fine standalone GUI builder out there, but I forget what it's called. It generates C. Then there's VDKBuilder, which is an entire C++ IDE that includes a GUI builder.
    • KDE. For KDE, there are a few full-featured IDEs, the best of which right now is KDevelop. If you can get QT on deployment machines or want KDE on deployment systems (it's a damn fine desktop, and is available as Solaris .pkgs), you can do some *really* slick, fully GNU tools-ified work with KDevelop, and it will let you do "ordinary" QT development if you don't want to build KDE apps. It'll happily package up your source tree with autoconf support, SGML, HTML and man page documentation while you're at it. Since you're looking into commercial GUI builders, I assume you don't have a problem with the license fee for doing commercial QT development.
  • All the previous ideas have been very good. I've been looking for something similar. I've also come across YACL (Yet Another Class Library) The library scources are free for download from http://www.cs.sc.edu/~sridhar/yacl.html [sc.edu]

    There's also a book on it Building Portable C++ Applications with YACL isbn: 0201832763

    Just thought I'd throw that one into the pot too.

    -C

  • IST's X-Designer will generate both C++ and Java (and Windoze MFC code) from a single Motif-based design. See www.ist.co.uk FYI, X-Designer is the tool that Sun adopted as their GUI builder for their Visual WorkShop. IST usually have a later version available than Sun at any time.

  • I use forte but... (Score:3)

    by ehovland ( 2915 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @10:42AM (#1067380) Homepage

    There are several choices for solaris. dtbuilder, which is very simple and featureless but free and already in CDE/solaris. Sun's forte development environment [sun.com], which can be try-n-buyed for 30 days or bought for anywhere between 300 (edu price) and 3500 USD. Both Kdevelop [kdevelop.org] and GLADE [pn.org] work under solaris. Teleuse [aonix.com] is actually not sold by telesoft, but by a company called aonix [aonix.com].

    Just choose one of those options and you will be fine. If I had a choice myself I would use either Kdevelop or forte. Kdevelop because it uses qt so it is entirely c++ (which seems to be a requirement for you) as well as the possibility of portability since qt runs on windows. Forte, because Sun makes it so it will have Sun support as well as having a significant performance advantage on sparc.

    If you decide on motif as your windowing toolkit and use forte and you have oodles of money in your pocket. Consider adding XRT [klgroup.com]. Very many high quality widgets which can improve the look of just about any gui.

  • Have you considered using Glade? That should work on solaris. The Url for glade is http://glade.pn.org/.

    If you are only interested in Motif or OpenLook gui builders, I'm sorry, I can't help you there. When I wanted a gui on solaris, I just went and installed GTK+ (http://www.gtk.org/).

    I don't really care for GUI builders much. I prefer pencil and paper for design, then I just code them.
  • BX-Pro from ICS [ics.com] sounds like exactly what you're looking for. It spits out C or C++ for Motif, or Java. They're the company supporting MotifZone.net, which hosts the new "Open" Motif release. --JRZ
  • Why not? Because you have to build different designs for C++ and Java -- you can't switch between the two from one single GUI design like you can with Sun Forte C++/WorkShop or X-Designer. And another thing, it's the Open Group web site that hosts the Open Motif release. There are also releases of Open Motif from Metrolink and from IST - who also built the Open Motif source release for Open Group.
  • Ok, slightly off topic and slightly biased (I'm the motifzone webmaster), but none of the other you mentioned above has the level of linux commitment as we do. We did a *lot* of work and testing to make sure no major linux platform was ignored. Others only built for Red Hat 6.1 on x86 and FreeBSD.
    We built and did extensive testing on x86, alpha, ppc, and sparc. We also packaged for most major releases. Oh yeah, there is the work to get 107 mirror sites.
    Like I said, I'm a bit biased, but I think we really showed support for just about anyone we could.
  • I don't understand why different designs are needed for C++ and Java. Can u please explain.

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