Re: gtkmm capabilities

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw netspace net au>]

Roel Vanhout wrote:
> Russell Shaw wrote:
>
> > When i was doing difficult M$ stuff with meta-file handling, replies to
> > my questions were few, and i could only find snippets of code from few
> > thick expensive books.
> > With gtk, i can find plenty of *working* source to look at, find plenty
> > of mail archives, and even ask developers something. I've got far more
> > efficient now than when i was hacking proprietory ware.
> > Without some kind of 20k$ licence, answers from proprietory vendors
> > are rare, and useful ones even more so.
>
>
> Ah yes, but that's with MS software. Don't forget that if you want, you 
> can still look at all the KDE applications to see how you'd get 
> something done in Qt. Again, don't get me wrong, I like gtkmm better 
> than I do Qt, but with Qt you get all the benefits of open source PLUS 
> great documentation. I personally find it frustrating sometimes with gtk 
> (and gtkmm) that the documentation doesn't contain any examples and that 
> there is no documentation at all about the more exotic functionality (ie 
> writing custom widgets, although that's recently gotten better in gtkmm 
> apparently).

http://www.gtk.org/tutorial/
http://www.gtk.org/tutorial/ch-writingyourownwidgets.html

> For open source hobby development, I can afford to spend an 
> evening digging through other people's code looking for those 10 lines 
> that I actually need, but when I'm writing code for other people, that 
> would be an expensive evening.

The main problem with gtk is that there's no central point of all
the information you need to completely understand it.

GObject, GType and signals take a long time to learn, and i only
did that after reading the gtk lists for months. This probably
doesn't matter as much with gtkmm which has C++ objects.

The gtk source also has an examples directory for testing lots
of functionality, but it doesn't help a lot for someone trying
to learn the basics.