I am a new programmer that is learning Java right now as well as Python. I use Linux based OS's and rarely use Windows. My question is how is one to decide what toolkit to use when developing GUI based applications on Linux. To clarify what I mean I will explain.

In the past half hour, I ran into these. GTK+, QT4, and wxwidgets. What is really complicating things for me is the fact that the main one I am interested in which is GTK+, also comes in flavors like GTK#, GTK-python, C++, and JAVA. Seeing as I only know java and some python, although I do plan on learning C# due to Mono, how am I to pick which one to use?

Or more generally, how does anyone go about picking which one to use. What makes one choose, wxWidgets over, QT4 for example, and then with what language do they use it? Maybe this is due to a lack of experience, but this seems really compicated to me. From what I know wxwidgets can be used on any platform, but then so can QT as well as GTK. I know that python is used with all of the above which makes me wonder if picking GTK is what I should do.

If anyone can help explain to me what criteria I should use when picking one to learn, as well as with what language. Or are these things rather easy to pick up to were I could easily learn all three of them. I assume they cannot be as difficult as learning a language although since I have no experience with them I cant say.

The only way to decide what you really want to use is to get in there experiment with em all. You will get a feel for what you like/dislike after playing with a few. Then you'll know what to look for in future experiments, APIs, etc...

Ok, I guess Ill start out with the GTK+ with Java to see what I can make happen. Thanks

(Just thinking out loud.) Hmm. I didn't know GTK+ can be used with Java. I thought GTK+ is used with C++.

This post has been edited by kanshu: 23 Oct, 2009 - 08:29 PM

Ye, GTK+ isn't used in Java, but uses its own builtin GUI library called Swing and AWT, although the Eclipse Foundation also developed SWT which can be added a separate library.

I would look into NetBeans. It's available for Linux, built from Java, and allows for a wide variety of development environments. You can work on Java and Python projects at the same time, as well as C++ and web based development including PHP and others. It also has a nice designer for visual GUI building.

NetBeans Website