What to use when building a desktop application?

Question

I'm making desktop application for my own use.

I can't decide on whcih language/toolkit/framework to use.

I would like a good User experience and a not so bad Performance.

The choices in my mind are:

1. wxPython
2. Titanium
3. Adobe AIR
4. any other suggestions that would fit

-- EDIT

I would also like it to be cross-platform

Experience, I've got some experience in Java, Python, HTML/JS. (Haven't done much .net stuff). I would live to learn if needed.

Answer 1

Try Flexonrails

then convert with adobeAir

:)

it will be good

im doing my desktop application with that

Answer 2

depending on your desktop OS. For Windows, you may get Microsoft Visual Studio Express Edition of C# or VB.Net. For Mac computer intel based computer, you have free XCODE available to do it or use JavaScript to build widget applications.

Answer 3

There are a lot of other considerations.

What platform? What OS? What level of backward compatibility? What runtimes are on the clients? What sort of graphics support do you need? 3D? 2D? What kind of interoperability do you need? What are your deployment scenarios? What languages do you want to write this in?

There are literally hundreds of technologies out there. You can only come up with a design when you have specified what your main constraints are.

Answer 4

Depending on what skills and tools you have available to you, as others have pointed out.

If you're on windows one simple accessable option is HTA applications.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496(VS.85).aspx

if you're on a mac, dashcode is a similar option for, not just authoring widgets, but also full on web applications.

both options give you access to many more api's than typical javascript has access to, such as filesystem access, or the ability to execute system commands.

There's a zillion others, but those options come for for free with their respective operating systems.

Answer 5

Dependes on what kind of application you would like to build, but you definitely should put in your list of tools to evaluate (at least) Delphi.

It compiles to native win32, is a rapid application development tool and has support for a lot of areas like databases, internet, com and many many others. Also, is built into Object Pascal, a very simple to learn language.

Up to some point, you can make it's applications cross platform using others IDEs like Lazarus in Linux.

Answer 6

Another option to look at would be QT. It's a cross platform C++ framework with Java & Python Bindings. It really does boil down to what type of application you want to build though and which platform(s) you want to target it at. If you're aiming at Windows specifically, you might want to consider using .NET and C# to take advantage of native support, on OSX, Objective-C and Cocoa, or on Linux C/C++ & whichever API set your targeted distro uses. And for cross-platform, which platforms would you like to target? Windows? OSX? Linux (Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora etc.)? That will also dictate your choice.