Creating C++ window forms in a text editor

Question

Im begining a bold new step in application development, c++ and I have not been able to find any decent documentation on coding form windows in a text editor without gui/ides like visual studio.

Even though I have no Cpp background If I had a working example of a form window in pure .h(cpp header) and .cpp(cpp source) for a form window and a login form that uses mysql connector for user credential authentication, I will be able to use this as a starting point, or baseline for my first Cpp application. My abilities with programming languages is similar to a pianist that doesn't read music but plays by ear, although I can learn to read music by listening to it if that makes sense. Basically if someone can point me in the right direction of creating form windows and login forms with mysql databases I can pickup from there without any help as I can learn from reading it. Many thanks in advance if you know what I'm after.

:)

Answer 1

Each operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.) has its on set of API's to create windows in C++. However coding purely from C++ and using only those API's can bit a little bit tedious and time consuming so there are several frameworks that simplify using those API's.

It can also make you application only compatible with one OS.

Visual Studio comes with MFC, that is only compatible with Windows, and not so great in my opinion.

The best up to date, cross-platforms frameworks are in my opinion Qt, wxWidgets, GTK+.

There's a list of them there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_GUI_libraries

In my opinion the best free framework at the moment, compatible with several OS (Windows, Linux, MAC, Android, iOS, etc.) with the best documentation is Qt.

https://www.qt.io/download/

Download this framework, and develop with QtCreator and you won't regret it.

You could still develop with Visual Studio and Qt, however QtCreator makes the Qt integration easier, and has a better text editor out of the box. Also it has GUI editor that makes creating forms much easier.

Qt also supports several databases, and has a driver for MySQL, as many others as you can see on this page:

http://doc.qt.io/qt-5.4/sql-driver.html