Group Assignment Interface and Application Programming

FablLab Kamp-Lintfort Jan Bewersdorff

Assignment

Compare as many tool options as possible

Since I already was able to use application programming tools in the past, I will quickly summarize my experiences with them and I will try to compare them as good as I possibly can. The extend of what I was able to use in the past, boils down to basically two experiences:

First and foremost, the first aspect I want to compare between these tools is the ease of getting into using them. For Java, which I mainly used during my course of studies, I found it hard to get into application programming. Swift was very unintuitive for me in the beginning. Then again, everything regarding programming was very unituitive for me in the beginning and as I became more and more familiar with standard concepts, Swift and later on JavaFX were pretty easy to use. Like all of the tools from my list, there are plenty of examples and turorials online, showing the user how to do the most basic or even a little bit more complicated tasks. As I was quite far into my studies when I first touched and learned C#, getting into Windows forms was pretty easy. There is an abundance of tutorials for it and just like C# itself the syntax for creating apllications is quite easy and can be learned relly quick. Funnily enough, my biggest problems with application programming I found during this FabAcadamy Cycle and by using python. To my defense, Ill have to add, that the last time I did anything in Python was years ago and so going from C# or ST back to python is quite the turn over. After a little bit of familiarization with python, the main syntax was again known to me much better. I previously never used something like Tkinter or PyQt to make applications and in preparation for this weeks assignment I tried getting into PyQt. I also found some tutorials and made some basic applications but the general usage seemed quite off for me coming from Windows Forms or JavaFX. Sadly the same was the case with Tkinter (at least in the beginning). Many things were really counterintuitive for me and i generally thought that it was not a great experience using Tkinter. But after the local lecture I have to say, I really like Tkinter. We went through most of the basics you would ever need and I was avery confident creating applications with Tkinter coming out of the lecture. In the end I had very little struggle to get my applications to work the way I wanted.

In the end, its the same with all of the tools for application programming as with the choice for a programming language or toolchain in general. What is the purpose of my application, what are my main focus points? If I want a real time application with great garbage collection and without too much cluttering, I will surely not use Java and therefore JavaFX. Generally speaking, I would say that if I have to make applications in the future, I will stick to python and its different frameworks, If I do not need to make the application specifically for Windows. In that case I would always prefer C# and Windows Forms whatever else is out there which I never used.