views:

197

answers:

4

Hi!


I want to make a nice simple gui using c++. which have drag and drop capabilities, must be light weight. Im thinking of a gui like utorrent client gui.Its light weight and simple. please give me information about most easy to use libraries / ide /plugin (on windows platform may be good).

+3  A: 

I would go with QT.

Some of the PROs:

  1. Free as in "free beer"
  2. Free as in "free speech"
  3. Multiplatform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS)
  4. Natively written in C++
  5. Easy to use

In my opinion, some of the CONs:

  1. If you are only targeting Windows platform, you might get better looking (and faster?) UIs with MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes)
Pablo Santa Cruz
+8  A: 

Either use QT or wxWidgets. Both are free to use, but QT uses more advanced features of C++ and is used slightly more than wxWidgets (From what I have seen) and has the backing of Nokia.

Both have various gui editors. QT has a QT Creator and there is a list of tools on the wxWiki, which includes a lot of open source RAD gui designers.

I have experience of using wxWidgets in both C++ and Python, and would recommend wxFormBuilder as a GUI designer.

The downside to both is they feel the need to use their own string classes etc which duplicates the functionality of the stl. From what I understand is that this is because when the projects were started there wasn't a standard.

Yacoby
+4  A: 

Qt seems to be the most natural choice for your requirements. It has a complete SDK which includes a GUI builder (Qt Designer), an IDE (Qt Creator), internationalization tools and comprehensive documentation. It can also be integrated with such IDEs as Eclipse and MSVS.

In addition to GUI libraries, it has lots of utility classes including containers, facilities for working with file system, processes, XML-data and databases, etc. So you can write the code only once and it will work on every platform supported by Qt, you'll just need to recompile it.

If it seems a little too stodgy at first glance, you may rebuild the Qt libraries from source to include only those modules you actually need.

P.S. I wouldn't suggest using MFC. It's just doesn't worth the effort when you have a more friendly and easy-to-grasp choice.

Alex
+2  A: 

Yet another vote for Qt. I am using it since about 8 years for now (EDA branch) and it works out very good.

Dominic.wig