views:

71

answers:

2

Here are my requirements for a very very simple desktop gui I need to make.

Totally standalone - Needs to be double clickable with out the reliance on having anything installed on the users machine.

Simple GUI - Bare bones. Will be loading a list from a file that will be stored in a dropdown or w/e.

Rock solid on Windows distributions - XP, Vista etc

Bonus (Not strong requirement) - Could create a mac app from the same source

Background:

I am a java developer and have created a demo program that runs off a flash drive. You just pop it in and double click. It loads a GUI which reads a file and lets you select contents of that file for a drop down enter some other info and hit save and saves a new file with the details.

I am potentially limited by space so I don't think I have room to bundle a jre with the app. We do not want to require the users to have a JRE installed so it can be as dumbed down as possible.

So I am looking for alternatives and have little experience in standalone desktop apps so seek some advice.

I am not opposed to using something that will only work on Windows if it is that much stronger as we can create a separate program for Mac since they should all have a JRE installed.

So far I've been looking into python with py2exe, C++, C#. I don't really know the pro's and con's and would love some help.

Thanks

A: 

What about Flash?

Daniel A. White
+1  A: 

Delphi is very comfortable for these tasks. Easy Gui building, single exe with copy&go installations, Object pascal as language,...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarcadero_Delphi

Patrick Cornelissen
Seems perfect Except it looks like the license for this is 999. At this point this little task does not justify us spending that much on it. Thanks though!
Jason
There are free versions that should suffice for small tasks!
Patrick Cornelissen