Best GUI Toolkit/Framework for Java and Python

Question

I've been write window programs with C# + WPF for a while now. It is very good, has alot of rich elements as of .NET 4.5 but I dont really buy the idea of porting window based programs to other operating system like OS X using mono and others.

I started working on Java and Python, I haven't written any desktop based program with anyone of them yet as there are war of GUI framework/toolkit out there and everyone is just getting religious about things.

I need some clarification hence the following Questions, mind you these questions might be answered before but like I said, Clarifications:

• What is the different between GUI toolkit and GUI framework
• For Java programming, I see swing is integrated with Netbeans, from my research, people are speaking of qt's Jambi and GTK for java and python, I have no idea about any of these and I want to know, (1) Which do you use and why? (for Java and python), (2) Visual studio do all the magic for WPF and C#, which IDE can do these magic in java and python.
• Lastly, I want you all to know that my asking these question is just to know which rich, powerful GUI and cross platform toolkit/framework (Whichever the right term is) is best for java and python with easy learning curve.

Constructive criticism are welcome BUT, I will be glad if there are answers.

Answer 1

I know QT is for Java (and Python of course). It is well documented and is used by a lot of people around the world.

Answer 2

JavaFX seems like a poor imitation of WPF.

Still, I have not seen any examples of how much (if at all) support does JavaFX provide for MVVM, which is what makes WPF the best UI Framework in the history of mankind.

from what I've seen, swing is more similar to winforms than anything else, if you come from WPF that will feel like going back to the stone age.

Side Note: java IDEs don't hold a candle compared to Visual Studio.