Is there any cross-platform GUI Toolkit which does not follow the one source to rule them all concept?

Question

After a long evaluation period of mainstream toolkits Qt, WxWidget, GTK i came to the conclusion that it does not make sense to religiously equalize the different platform. Now more then ever before.

In the days before Java portability meant, that platform dependent code was located in known places and should be small but not none. No write once, run everywhere marketing.

Is there any GUI tookit - experimental or commerical (even outdated or dead projects) - that is going this way. It would need to give me native widgets of course. I would like to have a look at them before i start my own toolkit

If you think this is a stupid idea tell me why (cause everybody else is doing it differently there may be a reason i don't see)

Answer 1

Have a look at SWT, it tries to use the widgets of the underlying platform as much as possible.

Answer 2

AFAIK, wxWidgets uses the platform's native widgets whenever possible.

Answer 3

As someone who zealously believes that GUIs should be drawn with native widgets, I must say I've been very impressed with wxWidgets, although you mention that at the beginning.

As far as I know, wxWidgets uses native widgets whenever possible, and indeed it does also include platform-specific features that are neither possible nor relevant on other platforms. A good example of this is how you can use the native Mac OS X menu, while on other systems it won't do squat. There are other and better examples.

I must mention wxPython in particular, in case you either don't want to or just don't have the time to write a C++ program. wxPython astonished me when I tried it out first, and I even managed to make a stand-alone .exe file from it that worked on a fresh install of Windows 2000 without any updates or particular runtime environments.

If wxWidgets doesn't suit your needs, I wonder what would. :) Hurray for wxWidgets!