Decisions, decisions

When I'm doing stuff for my own interest and enjoyment, it's almost certainly client-side applications. And unless it's something that is very definitely targeted at a particular set of OS specific functionality, I like it to be cross-platform and easy for a naive end-user to run. This was a particular pull of Java — though it was soon shown to be very definitely “debug everywhere” when the two main browser JVMs (Microsoft and Netscape) interpreted the thumb-width of a scrollbar differently (inclusive or exclusive of the range — or “lol, box-model”). And the API, even for AWT, was far nicer than any of raw Win32/Win16, MFC or OWL, back in the day.

So then the progression went AWT to GWT (a light-weight widget set that had all the missing widgets from AWT) to Swing… and there it stayed. But that did mean programming in Java, which, over the years, I've come to find lives at the wrong level of abstraction : it doesn't afford the ruthless power that C++ does (templates, multiple inheritance), but without giving very much in return (generics are latecomers, and comparatively weaksauce; there's nothing like mix-ins; and everywhere a lot of the same scaffolding that C++ would require).

Growing dissatisfaction pushed me to look at native (as opposed to bytecode) toolkits, where I could get to use C++, eventually settling on FOX, over wxWidgets. The downside of FOX is that it was not built for localisation (too many strings baked in), and the event handling model seemed to fight the language compared with Java's X-style callback registration (wxWidgets lost on having what felt like a more opaque layout model). But than meant compiling on Windows and Linux, and having to tweak platform dependent system header files (and hoping that other *nix-like platforms would work).

The moving target that is C# provided a bit of a distraction — I'll learn it for work, but are all new languages going to be just warmed-over Java? It didn't matter that Mono was providing portable CLR GUI by stages, when the language (C#) had little appeal in and of itself. So it wasn't until stumbling into Ruby and Python in the last few months that I discovered some more shiny in terms of language.

But what to do for client-side applications? Python with wxWidgets? Ruby with FOX? and what about naive users? Jython 2.2 in stand-alone mode? Pity about JRuby's sprawling nature. But what about AllInOneRuby and its friends? I had just about come down on standalone Jython, when the whole silverlight business blew up.

So now I think I know my GUI toolkit. And while we only have IronPython out (and ported to Mono) at the moment, that both Python and Ruby should soon co-exist in the DLR means that it should be possible to do what works best for the application at hand. When an object is an object is an object, much fun should be available.