[WF-General] authoring frameworks

[James Turner]

On 11 Apr 2007, at 16:55, Erik Hjortsberg wrote:

> Eclipse seems like the most functional one, with a myriad different  
> authoring tools, widgets, plugin sub frameworks etc.. It's also a  
> framework written from scratch as an authoring/development  
> framework. However, I've never tried to interface Java with C++, so  
> that's the great uncertaintly (speed is not an issue, but ease of  
> use and complexity is).
> Qt on the other hand isn't as heavily focused on authoring/ 
> development (being a general application framework), plus I've  
> never actually developed in it (but I know James have, so I'm  
> hoping for some input from him). It's however C++...

I would be quite nervous about interfacing C++ and Java, mostly  
because I'm pretty sure you have to go through a pure C wrapper (but  
possibly automatically generated).

Qt is 'just' a widget library really, albeit a very big one. It's  
pretty trivial to create the kinds of user interface you'd expect -  
toolbars, dialogs, menus. It does (now) feature some very good 2D  
drawing primitives, but I assume you don't need those for Ember.  
Obviously there is the crucial QGLWidget which exposes a widget which  
can do OpenGL drawing (and provides the OpenGL context) - I assume  
people have already got OGRE running with QGLWidget, - if not I've  
done that job with OpenSceneGraph and while boring it's not difficult.

Hope this is useful, if you have any more specific questions about Qt  
I can probably answer them.

James