I am fairly new to the domain of GUI design and development. I do have some prior experience but that is with Visual Basic.
I would like to develop a reasonably comprehensive (though not state-of-the-art) GUI application on linux based on a command line app. that I have. Having done some googling, I do find that there are mainly three good (or perhaps that is what I feel) ways to achieve this goal:
- GTK+ library with GLADE as the designer
- Qt library with Qtdesigner as the designer
- Java swing with Netbeans
In order to settle upon one of the above (or reject all of them), I would have to know the following aspects of each item in the above list. These aspects, in decreasing order of their priority are:
- Licensing: I would not be able to shell out too many bucks here...
- Programming language support: I know C/C++ and very little Java.
- Ease of learning / use
- Flexibility and power: It would be really nice if most (if not all) features that I need are available in the core library.
- (Lack of) additional dependencies: Reasoning same as point number 4
- Look and feel
- Platforms supported / Portability (effort required to switch platform)
Any ideas on the above topics would be worth their weight in gold (I wouldn't want to realize after one month that I chose the wrong tool for my job). Are there any other tools more fitting to my purpose that I am unaware of?
Point-blank answers would most help.
EDIT: Ok so I have finally gone with Qt. Simply because it is easier to learn and appears more portable than GTK+ (to me ofcourse).