On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 13:38:11 -0500, Patrick McCabe
<patrickm at citilink.com> wrote:
> I have been using Linux for a few years now, but all my software
> development has been for Windows (MFC and VB). We finally have a
> customer who wants to use Linux.

Porting or rewriting the could be a tremendous undertaking that isn't
financially viable.  I would first look at making the existing
application run under Wine, then recompiling it against Winelib.  The
Winelib approach is nice because it gives you a "native" Linux
application and can theoretically run on non x86 hardware and doesn't
require the user to install Wine.
 
> What we need to do is not very complicated -- something comparable to a
> simple VB app on Windows.

The best GUI RAD for Linux on x86 is probably Kylix.  Kylix is the
Linux version of Delphi / C++Builder.  Delphi is a RAD like VB, but
arguably much better.  One huge advantage here is that you can develop
your  application using Delphi or C++Builder, then simply recompile it
on Linux with Kylix.

theKompany's BlackAdder is an IDE for developing cross platform
applications with Qt and Python.  I wouldn't use it personally as I
dislike how Qt doesn't run natively on Win32 and Mac OS X, but might
be worth looking at.

wxPython is a very nice library for building truely cross platform
applications that run natively on Linux (X11), Win32 and Mac OS X. 
wxPython is a Python binding for wxWidgets, a free cross platform
widget set that runs natively on all supported platforms (unlike Qt
which pretends to be native and gets a number of things wrong).  There
isn't a complete RAD for it yet (Boa Constructor wasn't ready for
prime time last I checked), but wxDesigner makes it relatively easy to
design GUIs.

To summarize, look at things in this order: Wine/Winelib, Kylix, wxPython

-- 
David Phillips <david at acz.org>
http://david.acz.org/

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