“This week and next I will list my main concerns and complaints
about GTK and GNOME. Jeff Waugh, a GTK/GNOME developer, agreed to
review my columns and point out where he thinks I’m right, wrong,
what is being addressed in future versions, what isn’t, and why. If
you contribute to or program with GTK, GNOME, Qt, and KDE, please
send me your thoughts. I will select interesting opinions, condense
them, and add my own reactions in a follow-up column. I understand
that these aren’t the only desktops, widget toolkits, and
programming languages out there, but I would appreciate it if you’d
confine your comments to GTK, GNOME, Qt, KDE, C and C++, otherwise
I’ll have far too much material for any follow-up. We can always
address other tools and languages later.“Before I begin with my criticism, let me assure you I
understand there are several different philosophies of application
development. Some people prefer GTK not because it is the better
tool kit, but because the approach makes more sense to them,
because GTK is more granular than Qt, prefer C to C++, or another
reason. I cannot address all of these factors, but I will try to
take them into account wherever they matter. There are also
legitimate licensing issues that will lead someone to prefer GTK to
Qt, but I do not intend to address those, either…”
“As for the quality of documentation, I will offer my opinion,
but I strongly recommend that you judge for yourself which
documentation is adequate for your needs. The resources section
below contains links to online documentation for GNOME, GTK, some
of the libraries upon which GTK depends, some additional toolkits
associated with GNOME and GTK, and some additional links to
resources such as the increasingly popular C++ layers called
gnomemm and gtkmm. It also contains links to various KDE libraries
and the documentation for Qt.“If I had to describe the documentation for GNOME/GTK
development in three words, I’d say overwhelming, scattered, and
incomplete. Add ‘occasionally excellent’ and that should give new
developers for GNOME/GTK a good idea of what you’re in for…”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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