fettig.net

Lately I’ve been doing some research on free development tools

for

Windows. There are

a couple of reasons for this. First, because

I’d like to see the software I write run on multiple

platforms, and

Windows is certainly an important step in that direction (my

default platform being, of course,

Linux). Second, because I’m currently working for a client

that uses Windows almost exclusively, and I’d like to be able to

borrow some of the tools that I’m used to using for Linux development.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

• Python runs great on Windows,

  and even lets you do cool Windows-specific things like build COM objects

  in 100% pure Python, without compiling. If you’re interested, there’s an

  exellent O’Reilly

  book on the subject. And there’s a chapter on working with COM

  available for free.

• GTK, the toolkit with which many Linux

  applications such as the Gimp are built,

  is available for windows with

  Python bindings. You can even design your interface with

  Glade, a very nice interface designer (although the Glade-Python bindings

  for windows are really hard to find in compliled form. It took me forever to find

  a site that had them, and then I lost the URL).

  I used Python, Glade, and GTK to write

  Loggerhead, the program I use to maintain the news on this site, and I’m happy

  to report that (after some tweaking) it runs perfectly on both Linux and Windows.

• The problem with GTK apps is that they don’t look like standard Windows software.

  So I’m thinking of switching to wxPython.

  This is a set of Python libraries that creates interfaces using a desktop environment’s

  native toolkit, so it looks just like other applications written for that platform.

  On Windows, wxPython apps look like other Windows apps. On Linux, they look like

  other GTK apps (GTK is used under the hood). It’s pretty neat stuff, and it works.

  This is probably what I’ll use for future GUI projects.

• Of course, I don’t expect Windows users to actually try out my software

  unless it’s all packaged up in a nice self-installing .exe. And while I haven’t built

  any installer packages yet, there are a couple of promising open source options.

  From the boys at Nullsoft, there’s

  the popular NSIS. Another

  very nice looking (and, from what I’ve seen, less intimidating) installer package

  is Inno Setup,

  from Jordan Russell.

Based on what I’ve seen so far, I feel very comfortable that I’ll be able to develop

for Windows using nothing but freely available, open source software. I save

the cost of Visual

Studio, and my code remains platform independent. Nice.

Oh, and Source Forge currently lists

5042 open source projects in its Windows section.

Happy coding!