Question

I am looking to build a very simple GUI for a C++ application. Fancyness, design and advanced features don’t matter. What is important however, is that I can write automated tests against it, programmatically checking content of fields and clicking buttons. It also needs to run at least on Linux and Windows, preferably also Mac. Any suggestions?

Edit:Open Source tools are highly preferred.

Answer 1

_{Sorry I am a bit late in answering.}

Well there are many options in GUI programming. However, since you say you want something simple without flairs and eye-candy, the choice narrows down a little. Here are my suggestions:

QT

Pretty awesome. Don’t want to sound like a Nokia (or Trolltech) evangelist, but this framework has it all. Mature API, Good design, Platform independence, Flexibility you name it! However, simplicity? Well… that’s not a strong point, in fact, QT is the exact opposite. It tends to be more on the extremely heavy and well-armed side, definitely not simple.

GTK+

Again, pretty cool. Supports less platforms than QT, but has a pretty mature API, works on all the platforms you mentioned, the design is pretty awesome too. Flexibility? Well the new GTK+ 3 is a lot flexible but GTK+ 2 (the current latest supported version for Windows) lacks a bit in this respect. It’s simpler than QT however, less eye-candy etc. But it relies on a ton of third-party libraries, which is a bit of a disadvantage for some platforms.

_{For a comparison between the above two, see one of my previous answers.}

FLTK

Frankly, IMHO this is the toolkit that fits your needs the best. It’s simple, platform-independent, very easy to deploy and cross-compile and pretty mature (though it’s community is not quite as active as GTK+ and QT). It’s OpenGL based, and looks pretty much similar on all platforms (I don’t know if this is a pro or con in this case ). It’s got a pretty lenient license, you can statically link the entire library, no dependencies except OpenGL.
Runs on all platforms supported by OpenGL.

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I am looking to build a very simple GUI for a C++ application. Fancyness, design and advanced features don’t matter. What is important however, is that I can write automated tests against it, programmatically checking content of fields and clicking buttons. It also needs to run at least on Linux and Windows, preferably also Mac.

Overall, from the requirements you mentioned, I think FLTK is ideal for you. Though you should also take a look at the other two if you aren’t satisfied.

Update:

Testing Frameworks:

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any good testing framework for FLTK though. For QT, there is the QTestLib. For GTK there is dogtail.