Off Topic: GUI programming

[Jeff Franks]

Xavier Otazu wrote:

>[snip]
>
>	The ultimate (and the ONLY) problem is that one of the topic we teach
>is GUI design. Thus, alumni have to work, i.e. to program, with GUI. I know
>there exists several GUI libraries implementations for Linux (Qt, GTK+,
>wxWindows, Motif, the GFC Jeff Franks posted in this list, etc ...), but I don't
>know them deeply. Another problem, is that our alumni doesn't have much
>experience with Linux. In fact, they neither know anything about MFC nor Visual
>C++, but actually we teach them two classes about MFC to introduce basic
>concepts.
>
>	Hence, my question is, what do you think is the best GUI library to teach using
>Linux platform? Alumni should be able to perform the most basic tasks (create a
>dialog, insert buttons, react to button clicking, etc) with two introduction
>sessions.
>
>	
>
Being an ex-Windows programmer, I can honestly say that learning Linux 
programming required a complete mind shift, from the protective bounds 
of Visual C++ 5.0 to C programming using my favourite Linux text editor 
and command shell. But that's how Linux is. Most tools are run from the 
command line. You need to know how to use the GNU autotools to write and 
build a GNU compliant autotools project, and how to add international 
language support.

QT/KDevelop is a reasonable choice but it's not how the other half 
program (Linux C GTK+ programmers). QT uses a MOC compiler and doesn't 
use the standard C++ library. C GUI programming with GLib/GTK+ would 
teach your Alumni more about Linux programming. GTK+ is released under 
the LGPL so it can be used in commerical and free software. GTK+ has 
been developed for a long time so it's very stable. It has a large 
dedicated team of developers so GTK+ will be around for a long time to 
come.

Regards,
Jeff Franks.