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Easiest way to build a cross-platform application

Asked 2011-01-24T09:17:31.560
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I have read a few articles in the cross-platform tag. However, as I'm starting a fresh application (mostly a terminal/console app), I'm wondering about the easiest way to make it cross-platform (i.e. working for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows). I have thought about the following:

  • adding various macro/tags in my code to build different binary executables for each operating system
  • use Qt platform to develop a cross-functional app (although the GUI and platform component would add more development time as I'm not familiar with Qt)

Your thoughts? Thanks in advance for your contribution!

Edit: Sounds like there are a lot of popular responses on Java and Qt. What are the tradeoffs between these two while we're at it?

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I would suggest using a technology designed for cross-platform application development. Here are two technologies I know of that -- as long as you read the documentation and use the features properly -- you can build the application to run on all 3 platforms:

Of course, there is always the web. I mostly use web applications not just for their portability, but also because they run on my Windows PC, my Ubuntu computer, and my Mac.

We mainly build web applications because the web is the future. Local applications are viewed in my organization as mostly outdated, unless there is of course some feature or technology the web doesn't yet support that holds that application back from being fully web-based.

answered 2011-01-24T09:21:37.963

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