What is a good GUI / Widget toolkit for windows?

Question

So I'm pretty much fed up with WTL and Windows Forms, and not entirely convinced of the direction WPF is heading, I use it but I think it still has some quirks, and there's the fact that you need to ship the .NET framework with it. I know there is QT and GTK.

Are there any other modern solutions? Adobe AiR/Flex comes to mind, but that again needs an entire runtime just for it to work.

Recommendations for toolkits that work with .NET / c# are fine, but I'm also looking for other cross-platform (support for windows a must), open source solutions that use open gl and allow for quick gui prototypes that work in other languages (not necessarily c/c++ however)

update:

With QT going open source, I think I can close this question

Answer 1

See xul/xulrunner

It's cross-platform, and you can write in JavaScript or (if you dig in enough) write XPCOM components in C++. You can quickly pull together an application GUI. And you're harnessing the power that built Firefox, Thunderbird, Songbird, Chatzilla, etc.

The OpenGL part could be some more work, but it's been mentioned in the xul documentation and there's some discussion here that is relevant.

Answer 2

I've never used it, but I hear that VCF is great, and works with Windows, *nix and Mac. It's written in C.

Answer 3

wxWidgets. Pretty mature, and you get cross-platform-ness for free.

Answer 4

If you're open to Ruby, and this isn't a super-professional project (otherwise you would probably be told what to use), try Shoes. It doesn't have OpenGL support but it will do the rest, and it's as painless as UI toolkits come.

Answer 5

There's a large list of toolkits available, most of which are designed to solve the portability issues. A list off the top of my head would be something like

Qt

wxWidgets

gtk

swt - java

Wikipedia has a fairly good list of widget toolkits

Answer 6

The Visual Component Framework has some pretty powerful features, particularly if you're on windows. Specifically, based on what you mentioned, it has: - an OpenGLKit library that support OpenGL integration - a prototyping language that let's you define the UI in an easy to use format that's similar to Delphi's Form file. It's much easy to use than XML. - thorough MVC support throughout the UI parts of the library - something you might be interested in: it has roughly comparable data binding support to what you find in WPF, and this data binding can be specified in the prototyping language.

It's designed to be cross platform, however the linux port is largely inactive at the moment, and the Mac OSX is still not complete.

Answer 7

I think you surely have to consider WPF/Silverlight here because of the vast Skinning and Themeing possibilities.

Answer 8

Yes, QT since 4.5 is licensed under the LGPL, so its the recommendation for a modern, full featured framework.

GTk is C, you need gtk++ for the c++ bindings.

wxWidgets is a free MFC clone, the only recommendation since days because is also licensed under the LGPL and free also for using in commercial applications and cross-platform. But, this MFC style is a bit outdated and not really a modern designed OO framework. But I would place it shortly after Qt.

Adobe Air/Flex is nice and you can also design your own UI elements with Flash. But for desktop applications I would prefer some of the other native solutions.