What is involved in making a GUI program?

[357mag]

If a guy wanted to eventually make some graphical programs in Zeus what additional stuff needs to be added? Does Zeus come with a built in GUI toolkit or what would I have to do or add to write some simple GUI programs?

Most of my prior programming stuff has been console so I have done very little graphical programming that's why I ask.

I would using either Java or C# for this.

[jussij]

The first thing about GUI applications is they depend entirely on the GUI layer being used.

For example for Java there are at least two GUI options in Swing and SWT.

For C++ there are several including Win32, MFC, Qt and wxWidgets.

For C# the two common options are WinForms and WPF.

For scripting languages like Lua and Python they usually have a wrapper around wxWidgets.

So as you can see, when it comes to GUIs there are a lot of choices.

To write GUI code you first need to pick a language, pick a GUI and then work with the GUI builder for that GUI to create your application.

Now because Zeus tries to supports all of these languages and because of the wide number of GUI choices (which all need there own GUI builder) it is not possible for Zeus to have any GUI support.

If it did, Zeus would have to do exactly what the programmer has to do, pick one language, pick one GUI and just forget about all the others.

Cheers Jussi

[357mag]

Thanks for the reply. So vast is this programming hobby. It's like the Atlantic. Huge.