On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 15:41 +0300, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
Hello Duncan,
Monday, November 13, 2006, 3:36:32 AM, you wrote:
afaik, there are just two good enough libs - wxHaskell and GtkHs. can
in brief, i see the following main differences:
- wxHaskell is easier to understand and to use, Ght2Hs allows to use Glade to develop "look&feel"
Easier to understand is rather a matter of personal taste. Certainly Gtk is a big library, providing lots of features. I should also note that one of the main improvements in the upcoming Gtk2Hs release will be to try to simplify the api and improve the reference documentation by making greater use of atribute and signal abstractions rather than lots of getter/setter functions.
- Gtk2Hs had better support, but now wxHaskell has more maintainers and situation may change to opposite in a next few months
It'll be good to have more competition :-) hopefully both systems will improve more rapidly.
- wxHaskell provides more native look&feel, while Gtk2Hs simplifies porting of GUI application from Windows to Linux. Also Gtk2Hs needs Gtk DLL to be installed, but this can be made a part of application installation procedure, afaik?
Both Gtk2Hs and wxHaskell need DLLs to be installed and in both cases it can be made part of the install procedure. You just need to bung the right set of dlls in the same directory as the .exe that you distribute. It's exactly the same as with any other windows app that needs extra dlls.
- Gtk2Hs has better memory management
- differences between Gtk and wxWidgets that i will go to study
i also have more questions: first, how about tabbed pages control? such controls are widely used to represent plenty of information in limited screen space
Both have tab controls.
second: ability and easiness to develop my own controls, and to combine several customized controls together to make one "supercontrol" (although i guess that last feature is important only for RAD environments)
third: are there any "appetizers" demonstrating features of each library and with source code available for studying? except for memory.pdf which don't mention where full source can be downloaded
There are a bunch of demos included in the Gtk2Hs sources and there are various apps written by other people available on the web. For example: http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/pivotal/downloads.html http://haskell.galois.com/~paolo/nymphaea/ Apart from the memory pdf intro there a general intro presentation and a glade tutorial: http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/archives/2006/03/06/introductory-presentation/ http://eddy.writelinux.com/gtk2hs/GladeGtk2Hs.html
it will be interesting to see sources of more "business-like" applications developed with both libs. if there are no ones, may be i will develop basic file manager utility as such appetizer
That would be great. Duncan