Is Java the best language to develop cross-platform GUI applications?

java user-interface desktop-application
Frederick picture Frederick · Dec 23, 2008 · Viewed 25.8k times · Source

For "best" I intend that the code shouldn't need, or need very few, platform specific tweaks.

Answer

Eli Courtwright picture Eli Courtwright · Dec 23, 2008

I strongly recommend Java for cross-platform GUI development. In particular, I recommend the GUI builder that comes with the Netbeans IDE. It's very simple and very powerful. You can point and click and drag and drop to create a GUI, and easily customize the actions which various buttons and other components take.

I much prefer Python as a language, but none of the free tools for GUI development come anywhere close to this, and the same thing seems to be true for the other languages I've used. (I should point out that QT has wonderful GUI developers for various languages such as C and Python, but it's only free when used on open source projects.)

EDIT: QT has recently been relicensed as LGPL, so you're free to use it in commercial applications. The Python bindings for this (PyQT) have not been re-licensed, but another project called PySide has been created to provide Python QT bindings.

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