gui application frameworks for windows hello i m investigating the purchase of an object oriented application framework i have come across a few that look good zapp from inmark zinc from zinc software c views from liant win from blaise some considerations i m using being new to windows programming i m from the unix x world the quality and intuitivness of the abstraction that these class libraries provide is very important however since i m not adverse to learning the internals of windows programming the new programming methodology should be closely aligned with the native one i don t believe arbitrary levels of abstraction just for the sake of changing the api are valuable since we will be developing for the bit windows nt system the memory management issues and issues particular to the windows api are less important we will probably buy another c class library something like tools h or booch components from rational to handle data structures and other miscellaneous stuff allocators etc so those features are not that important for this toolkit to have the two that i have narrowed it down to are zapp and zinc they seem to be the two toolkits that have received the most attention from the media i was wondering if anyone had any first hand experience with any of these toolkits especially zapp and zinc a couple of observations about these toolkits that seem particularly noteworthy are zapp seems to have the most extensive coverage of windows functionality and also includes some other miscellaneous useful classes has new fancy d style controls available and support for custom controls has a windows nt version essential redirectable graphics display output architecture useful for printing sizer class for automatically managing control layout after resize seems to be the newcomer this could be an advantage in designing a better system zinc has a platform independent resource strategy not too important for me right now comes with a interface builder tool has a windows nt version essential seems to have been around longer more mature but grew up out of a dos version had a better demo both have source code availability options both are lacking ole support neither seem to have any particular support for multimedia type stuff any thoughts anyone has on this would be much appreciated thanks brett harper brett harper cimlinc com
