Inquiry about portable GUI and scripting

I have a need to do shell-like scripting and GUI generation for the "big 3" operating systems: Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. I'm writing a large Geant4-based simulation program; until now it's been Linux only, but I want to release it for all 3 systems and meet their users' expectations. That means I cannot reasonably require Cygwin on Windows, and thus I need to replace my bash scripts with something else, preferably having a graphical user interface. As the program already uses Root for the generation of NTuple files and histograms, I'm interested in peoples' opinions: is it crazy to use Root as a pure scripting and GUI language? Root is definitely capable of doing what I need, but it sure seems like overkill....

	[The alternatives I know of are: Java, Qt, and GTK++. Tcl/Tk
	 would seem to be the best of all, except no re-distributable
	 Windows version is available outside of Cygwin. Right now
	 I'm undecided between Java and Root (if Root were not
	 already required it would not be on the list at all).]

Note I spent last week building a Root GUI application to simplify generating histograms from NTuple files. So I am familiar with the Root GUI classes and know it is completely suitable for what I need. Of course Java is equally suitable, and has fewer quirks and less overhead.

Comments? Suggestions?

Tom Roberts Received on Sat Jan 20 2007 - 20:33:45 CET