Choosing a GUI Library for Your Embedded Device

Using Nano-X is a real headache. Documentation is not good. Though we have no better solution for uClinux we are using in our project (another option is Framebuffer, he-he).
E.g. it's quite unobvious how to setup a regional-specific font.

You have to look into the sources all the time.

Nano-X is indeed very small and basic but this is exactly why I think it's so worthwhile using it.

Many things can be implemented using simpler means and one has no difficulty looking directly at the Nano-X source code to get a grasp on how things are done there; an insight can be easily gained. I think this gives a developer more freedom of choice how to get things implemented in his own way - at least to some extend.

Also, another advantage arises in my opinion from the conceptual closeness of Nano-X to X. Nano-X might have nothing to do with X11 in any way, however, porting applications that use Xlib by design is very much feasible.

Although it is true that Nano-X lacks widgets to be natively used, there is an extension called TinyWidgets that builds on top of the Nano-X library. In addition to providing most of the elements of a modern graphical user interface it does also come with a graphical designer which I have found helpful so far for my work with Nano-X.

Cheers,
Sören

I found two on a web search:

http://www.microwindows.org/

http://embedded.centurysoftware.com/docs/nx/index.html

you're clearly writing about the first one, but what's up with the second one??

Very good article, but I think you should mention that Qtopia Core is more then a GUI, it is an application framework. with a complete set of classes for things such as:

Session Management
Does your application need to save and restore settings, Qtopia hs this built in

Sockets:
Does your app need to talk to a server. or maybe be a server. QSockets(UDP & TCP) and QTcpServer are nifty classes for doing this.

Threads:
Do you need to do a heavy process outside the GUI thread, QThreads will aid here, and most classes in Qtopia are now thread safe

Database:
Qt comes with SQLite built in, and of course can talk to almost all major databases

Data Serialization
If you send data to and from other devices QT will take care of little endian/ big endian. All objects are easy to serialize with QDataStream

International
Do you need to support more then one language. Qtopia comes with a tool called Linguist which allows you to add multi language support without additional programing. It also supports Asian charactor sets as well as manages right to left languages in every GUI widget

Pixmap Management
Need to use something like a cancel pixmap in more then one location. Qtopia apps will cache pixmaps so they get stored once no matter how many places you use them. QImage and QPixmaps work hand in hand so images can be scaled on depending how they are to be used.

Interprocess Communication
QDbus makes it very easy for apps to talk to other Qtopia apps.

Themes
Want to have multiple looks for your display, perhaps a daytime display and a night time display. QTheme makes this very easy to do

It's nice to compare the these two windowing system on embedded systems. But IMO there are two major parts are missed in this article: software ported on these two systems and what kind of browser these two GUI systems support respectively. For example, besides Mozilla based browsers, is there a browser can run on Nano-X with Javascript capability?