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Are there any USB stick runnable, no-install, cross platform software frameworks (with GUI)?

Does anyone know of a good software development framework or similar that has the following properties?

  • Cross platform: it should be runnable on XP, Vista, OSX and common versions of Linux (such as Ubuntu and Kubuntu).
  • No installation: Be able to run the software from a USB stick without having to copy anything to the host machine.
  • Have good GUI support (this is why this question doesn't give a suitable answer, as far as I can tell).
  • Permissive licensing such as LGPL or BSD or such.

Among the softer requirements are having a set of abstractions for the most common backend functionality, such as sockets, file IO, and so on (There is usually some platform specific adaptations necessary), and supporting a good language such as Python or C++, though it is usually fun to learn a new one (i.e. not perl).

I think possible candidates are Qt 4.5 or above (but IFAIK Qt software will not run on Vista without any installation(?)), some wxWidgets or maybe wxPython solution, perhaps gtkmm. The examples I have found have failed on one or another of the requirements. This does not mean that no such examples exist, it just means that I have not found any. So I was wondering if anyone out there know of any existing solutions to this?

Some clarifications;

  • By "framework" I mean something like Qt or gtkmm or python with a widget package.
  • This is about being able to run the finished product on multiple platforms, from a stick, without installation, it is not about having a portable development environment.
  • It is not a boot stick.
  • It is ok to have to build the software specifically for the different targets, if necessary.

The use case I am seeing is that you have some software that you rely on (such as project planning, administration of information, analysis tools or similar) that:

  • does not rely on having an internet connection being available.
  • is run on different host machines where it is not really ok to install anything.
  • is moved by a user via a physical medium (such as a USB stick).
  • is run on different operating systems, such as Windows, Vista, Ubuntu, OSX.
  • works on the same data on these different hosts (the data can be stored on the host or on the stick).
  • is not really restricted in how big the bundled framework is (unless it is several gigabytes, which is not really realistic).

It is also ok to have parallel installations on the stick as long as the software behaves the same and can work on the same data when run on the different targets.

A different view on the use case would be that I have five newly installed machines with Vista, XP, OSX, Ubuntu and Kubuntu respectively in front of me. I would like to, without having to install anything new on the machines, be able to run the same software from a single USB stick (meeting the above GUI requirements and so on) on each of these five machines (though, if necessary from different bundles on the stick).

Is this possible?

Edit: I have experimented a little with a Qt app that uses some widgets and a sqlite database. It was easy to get it to work on an ubuntu dist and on osx. For windows xp and vista I had to copy QtCored4.dll, QtGuid4.dll, QtSqld4.dll and mingwm10.dll to distribution directory (this was debug code) and I copied the qsqlited4.dll to a folder named "sqldrivers" in the distribution directory.

Solution

  • You mention wxWidgets but dismiss it as failing at least one of the requirements.

    I don't know what your requirements are and in what way wxWidgets wouldn't work for you, but IMO it does fulfill them:

    Cross platform: it should be runnable on XP, Vista, OSX and common versions of Linux.

    It does run on those platforms, but "common versions of Linux" isn't good enough, as you can never be sure that the necessary GUI libraries for wxGTK (which should not be linked to statically) will be installed. This is however a problem for other solutions as well, unless you plan to put everything onto the stick.

    No installation: Be able to run the software from a USB stick without having to copy anything to the host machine.

    See the previous point, you would need to specify which libraries are needed on Linux. Also you could specify at build time not to use some of the system-provided libraries (for example for graphics, compression, regexes) but to use the wxWidgets-internal libraries instead.

    Have good GUI support

    Check.

    Permissive licensing such as LGPL or BSD or such.

    Check. You can statically link wxWidgets into your application too.

    supporting a good language such as Python or C++

    Supports both, and there are bindings to other languages as well.

    having a set of abstractions for the most common backend functionality, such as sockets, file IO, and so on

    It does have some abstractions like that, but you can link to other cross-platform libraries as well.

    We use wxWidgets for FlameRobin, a graphical administration program for the Firebird SQL server. It has active ports to Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and has been compiled for at least some BSD variant and Solaris as well. It definitely runs from a stick on Windows, I haven't tried with Linux or Mac OS X, but I don't see why it shouldn't there too.