GUI and Rapid Application Development

Colleagues,

file from windows to linux - I am eager to know what platform, from your experience, was faster in developing-deploying applications quickly. I come from a Windows background but most of my recent development is under Linux and gladly might remain so.

with VB+backend on Windows than Java+backend on Linux (buttuming that the client already has JRE and MS Office). It depends on the skill level, I agree, and therefore I would like some feedback from developers that have created similar GUI based applications on Windows and Linuxes.

One such example is -- A user wants to view a cryptic ASCII file of his choice in Excel, or atleast have a CSV. It took just a few minutes to develop a VB-Excel program in Windows that could run on Windows 98 through 2003. How quickly could we develop a similar GUI based program on Linuxes (any language)?

This post is not to bash any OS; its to know how fast people can develop simple GUI that users find comfortable using, and that saves them time. At my end, I created several little applications that saved several hours of work weekly on Windows. Not many of my end users work on Linux, but Perl has been very helpful in making CLI based applications that saved a lot of time but I dont know GTK-Pl too well, or even Java in that matter. It takes longer time to add keyboard navigation-shortcuts in Java than VB - thats for sure. Lets ignore the cost of purchasing Windows-Visual Studio (.NET) because thats not my headache as a developer.

Chirag Shukla.