This question has been asked many times and I have gone through most of them. Mo

Question

This question has been asked many times and I have gone through most of them. Most of these questions are old and don't include any new platforms for developing desktop applications.

I need to develop a basic desktop application with CRUD functionality with Sqlite or MySQL database. I used to work with Java (Swing) but the Swing JSR has been withdrawn and Netbeans has dropped Swing Application Framework.

I need to learn a new technology for developing desktop applications (preferably platform independent). So far I have looked into following technologies.

Titanium Desktop (Now called TideSDK) : This is good but some advance PHP features aren't supported and its full of bugs.

QT : It looks promising and have great features but I couldn't find any book on the latest version QT 5. All the books on QT are 4 - 5 years old an written for QT 4.

Are there any other technologies which I can use for developing desktop applications? and add it to my skill set?

Thanks for your help and sorry if this question is too general.

Explanation / Answer

The new trend is to use web technologies (HTML5 / javascript frameworks) to create desktop applications. Take a look at the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) that lets you embed the Chromium engine in your desktop app. See the list of applications using CEF on wikipedia. There are available bindings for many languages such as C, C++, Java, Python, C#, Delphi, Go lang.

Regarding Titanium Desktop and TideSDK, they are not developed anymore. The last commit for TideSDK was a year ago. And looks like this project for its whole time didn't go out of beta. The company behind it is working on its new product called TideKit. But you have no guarantee that it won't be abandoned like Titanium and TideSDK, or that it will ever come out of beta.

The Titanium and TideSDK let you develop in PHP, but it's kind of a new platform, it works differently, PHP is like a JavaScript to HTML. If you want to develop desktop apps in PHP the same way you develop websites then take a look the PHP Desktop project. It embeds an internal web server, a web browser (IE or Chrome) and a php interpreter. The workflow you are used to while creating PHP websites remains almost the same, you just copy scripts to the www/ directory. You shouldn't stumble on any new bugs that aren't already present in PHP, also it supports all PHP features, updating the PHP version is as easy as copying the new binaries to the php/ directory. PHP Desktop is supported only on Windows currently, though there are plans for Linux and Mac.

There is also the Node-Webkit project that lets you develop in Javascript using Node.js. It embeds the Chromium engine despite its name.

In the last days Atom Shell framework appeared, developed by Github. It lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on node.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.

Disclosure: I am the author of the CEF bindings for Python and Go lang. Also author of PHP Desktop.

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