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Gtk is to my knowledge the first toolkit one could make a whole UI with, dynamic resizing and all, dynamically (from XML files loaded at runtime), using a graphical editor (Glade), and all of that since at least 2000 (I know I submitted some patches to it back then). No toolkit today replicates the same ease of development. Gtk has many binding to various languages, and is relatively well-documented. Why has it not been successful? Well IMO because of several reasons: deep dependency on X, making its use on Windows a kludge at best; hostility in the community to making it viable for commercial use (basically, polishing it enough for integration, and willingness to compromise design purity for integration with native widgets), and the horrendous plague that seems to be the bane of many open source products that focus on Linux: how hard it is to compile, the many dependencies, not providing easy to use complete packages for Windows, ... On Linux it's no issue, you've got all dependencies already and otherwise your distro takes care of it. On Window you need(ed?) to download 5+ various packages with different build systems, somehow integrate them (with different build systems) into your build, and if you wanted to use C++ you needed an extra 3 or 4 (for gtkmm); and then the result was still a second-rate citizen on Windows. Plus there was the senseless bickering between Gnome and KDE (yes yes, competition is healthy, blah - if I had a penny for every hour wasted on that, I'd retire on the spot), the 'GTK = C' FUD, and the lack of people who wanted to go the extra mile of making a produkt rather than a nice proof of concept. The people familiar with it didn't care to make it easier for others, GUI tools were considered to be for 'pussies' and 'VB programmers' and so the self-righteous dogmatist make himself irrelevant by being surpassed by products who didn't think themselves above the average programmer. I'm still a bit bitter, at the time I was so much cleaner to write GTK application than moc-infested QT code (yes I know things have changed). |