What's the C++ GUI building option with the easiest learning curve - VS/Qt/wxWidgets/etc.?

Question

I\'m looking to be able to build GUI applications quickly and painlessly as possible. I\'m competent (though not expert, and have no formal training) in C++, but have never used

Answer 1

I would suggest wxWidgets. To me, it's pretty intuitive and looks nice.

Code::Blocks was built with it, so check that out to see if you like the graphics.

There are also a slew of bindings for wxWidgets, such as wxPython, wxErlang, and others, so if you decide to switch off of C++, you can take wxWidgets with you.

Answer 2

I also use wxWidgets and use it all the time for Windows-only applications (the only downside is that wxWidgets is notorious for large .exe filesizes, which may or may not be a problem for you). I found it very simple to use from the start, especially when combined with a GUI designer (personally I use wxDev-C++).

I've never used Qt, so I can't speak to its simplicity, but I doubt the difficulty is on a vastly different scale than that of wxWidgets. However, what I can say is that no matter what API you use (wxWidgets, Qt, WinAPI, etc) your code will be "locked into" that particular platform, so don't worry if you feel that learning Qt will lock you into the Qt platform (because the same thing will happen with any of those APIs).

If you're working solely on Windows however, you may want to do a few simple programs with WinAPI first. That way you have a basic understanding of the lowest level of Windows GUI programming before you move onto Qt/wxWidgets. That said, if you're really into cross-platform programming, then don't worry about that and go straight into Qt/wxWidgets.

Answer 3

No matter what you pick, I am quite sure it won't be easy and painless.

Having said that, I know that in some schools they use FLTK because they consider it relativelly easy to learn. I have never tried it.

In my everyday work I use WTL which is as close to the system as it gets while still providing some level of abstraction over pure Win32. I am not sure if I would consider it easy to learn, though, especially given the lack of documentation.

Answer 4

As a person who learned C++ through Qt, I can only say that they work very well together. C++ purists (like I have become) will find lots of things in Qt not to their liking (the moc preprocessor, e.g., and the continued absence of exceptions for error reporting), but looking back, Qt provided a very gentle introduction to C++ for me.

And if you're like me, you throw in a handful of boost libs in each Qt project, because we want to write "real" C++, not the softened thing Qt uses :)

Answer 5

Which is the easiest to learn is really going to depend on how you personally learn.

Personally, I've found Qt to be the easiest to learn so far. The GUI classes are rather nice to use, but I've found the non-GUI classes to be excellent, making it easy to avoid a lot of common issues you'd normally get with a more basic API. The documentation is excellent, IMO, as are the books, the examples, etc. It's also being very actively developed, with a few new technologies coming in the near future (like DeclarativeUI).

I've found Visual Studio/Windows API/.Net to be a good bit more complicated to learn. The API documentation on MSDN is rather complicated and not really organized in a manner that I find intuitive.

I've tried learning WxWidgets a few times, but I've never liked the API documentation.

All this is just my personal experience, YMMV of course. I'd say just dabble in all of them and see which one takes you the furthest, it won't hurt to try multiple.

Answer 6

I recommend codegear C++ builder (previously known as borland C++ builder) from codegear which comes with a 30 trial. The nicest thing about it is that the GUI provides you with components that you drop onto a form in a WYSIWYG fashion and make functional by adding code to handle the events it fires. It comes with a whole bunch of compontents out of the box and you can add 3rd party components to it too, like the awesome ExpressQuantumGrid from devexpress, or write your own. It's very powerfull if you know what you're doing but intuitive enough that a beginner can write a database CRUD application in about 20 lines of very simple code.