What is the best cross-platform language for desktop applications? (Java, Adobe Air, Flex, Silverlight?, Anything Else)?

If tooling is you issue, there are a couple of plugins for VS for writing Flex code sapphiresteel.com/Blog/Adobe-Flex-Plugin... ensemble.com/products/tofino.shtml.

If tooling is you issue, there are a couple of plugins for VS for writing Flex code. sapphiresteel.com/Blog/Adobe-Flex-Plugin... ensemble.com/products/tofino.shtml as two immediate examples. It does have to be said though, that unless you require specific desktop integration, you'd be better off writing a webapp as this is the best cross platform (but not cross browser ;) ) method.

I think Qt is the best thing out there currently. It is the basis of KDE, and looks pretty good on all platforms. It is write once compile anywhere.So you must build it specifically for each platform you want to support.

That is what leads to the high quality results though. As far as I know you need to program in C++ to use it, but if that is not a problem I think its your best choice.It has a very full featured IDE of its own that I would say is at least in the same ballpark as Netbeans/VS.

In Adobe AIR you know how it looks on EVERY platform. There is no difference and you don't need to build it for a specific platform as the AIR-Environment will do this for you, so you should at least have a look at it :) – hering Oct 29 '10 at 8:30 Yeah, I'll check it out. I just recently bought the Adobe CS5 Design Premium package.Is Flash Pro the tool I'd use?

– Joe Cannatti Oct 29 '10 at 14:44.

QT gets a lot of good reviews. So you should take a look at it. You can program for QT with C++ and various interpreted languages, with Python probably being the most popular.

However, you might find installing everything you need on each different platform difficult. I have a working environment for Qt/Python programming (with PyQT and PySide) for Windows, but have struggled to get something equivalent on OS X. (I haven't tried it on Linux).

I'm now looking at Adobe Air because in theory you can develop in JavaScript/CSS and deploy everywhere.

I'm an Air person. The IDE is built on Eclipse and in my mind is a very good IDE. You can get plugins for VS like @Gregor said to bridge that gap for you.

However if time is not on your side and you can't learn a new language. You may always use RealBasic. Its cross platform, surprisingly cross platform and the language is very similar to that of VB6 - therefore super easy to pick up.

Your apps would look more native on each OS more-so that an interpreted language but I'm not aware of alternative IDE's you can use.

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