Does anyone know of a good software development framework or similar that has the following properties?
- Cross platform: it should be runnable on XP, Vista, OSX and common versions of Linux (such as Ubuntu and Kubuntu).
- No installation: Be able to run the software from a USB stick without having to copy anything to the host machine.
- Have good GUI support (this is why this question doesn't give a suitable answer, as far as I can tell).
- Permissive licensing such as LGPL or BSD or such.
Among the softer requirements are having a set of abstractions for the most common backend functionality, such as sockets, file IO, and so on (There is usually some platform specific adaptations necessary), and supporting a good language such as Python or C++, though it is usually fun to learn a new one (i.e. not perl).
I think possible candidates are Qt 4.5 or above (but IFAIK Qt software will not run on Vista without any installation(?)), some wxWidgets or maybe wxPython solution, perhaps gtkmm. The examples I have found have failed on one or another of the requirements. This does not mean that no such examples exist, it just means that I have not found any. So I was wondering if anyone out there know of any existing solutions to this?
Some clarifications;
- By "framework" I mean something like Qt or gtkmm or python with a widget package.
- This is about being able to run the finished product on multiple platforms, from a stick, without installation, it is not about having a portable development environment.
- It is not a boot stick.
- It is ok to have to build the software specifically for the different targets, if necessary.
The use case I am seeing is that you have some software that you rely on (such as project planning, administration of informa