Practical GUI toolkit?

Question

I am thinking about cross-platform with nice programming language bindings (Java, Ruby and Python). What would be the \"flattest\" learning curve but yet enough powers to p

Answer 1

WX all the way! I am not a GUI expert, designer or a even a "GUI guy", but recently I needed to write a front end for a product config tool (actually it's a collection of tools, but we wanted a single interface to access and run them all).
The tools are all written in Python so naturally I turned to Python for the UI.
I settled on wxPython... one "import wx" and a few tutorials later, I was banging out frames, notebooks and button panels like I knew what I was doing.
I found plenty of examples to help me when I got stuck and the wxPython docs were very useful - although they are just C++ docs, they were still pretty intuitive.
A quick web search will turn up tons of wxPython tutorials to get you started.

I've written and refactored the UI couple times, but I had a clean, working prototype in < 1 day. The tool was cross platform and all the windows and frames matched the native window system (WinXP, Win2K3, Gnome, etc.) - I was definitely impressed. If I ever have to write UIs in any other language I will certainly be looking for a wx implementation.