| wxWidgets -- a free C++ cross-platform GUI toolkit |
(Last updated: Dec. 14, 2001)
wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) is a C++ GUI toolkit that gives you a single, easy-to-use API for writing GUI applications on multiple platforms. Link with the appropriate library for your platform (Windows/Unix/Mac) and compiler (almost any popular C++ compiler), and your application will adopt the look and feel appropriate to that platform. On top of great GUI functionality, wxWidgets gives you: online help, network programming, streams, clipboard and drag and drop, multithreading, image loading and saving in a variety of popular formats, database support, HTML viewing and printing, and much much more.
wxWidgets is a set of libraries that allows C++ applications to compile and run on several different types of computer, with minimal source code changes. There is one library per supported GUI (such as Windows, GTK+, Motif, and Mac). As well as providing a common API (Application Programming Interface) for GUI functionality, it provides functionality for accessing some commonly-used operating system facilities, from copying and deleting files to socket and thread support. wxWidgets is a 'framework' in the sense that it provides a lot of built-in functionality, which the application can use or replace as required, thus saving a great deal of coding effort. Basic data structures such as strings, arrays, linked lists and hash tables are also supported. See wxWindows 2 Classes for a list of the available classes (a little out of date now, so please also see the online class reference).
wxWidgets is not a translator from one GUI from another; it cannot take a Motif application and generate a Windows application, for example. You need to learn a new API. However, the wxWidgets API has been praised for its intuitiveness and simplicity, and can be far easier to learn and use than a native GUI API such as Motif or Windows. Porting from MFC is particularly easy due to its similarity: one user has ported his CASE tool from MFC to wxWidgets in a couple of weeks.
Such a toolkit is not unique - there are others to choose from - but wxWidgets is free, well-established, well-documented, and very broad in its coverage of GUI functionality. It has some extras that make it stand out from the crowd, such as the many convenience dialogs, built-in HTML display and printing, virtual filesystems, easy-to-use OLE automation controller class, Open GL support, and many other features that make it easier to write modern and user-friendly applications.
wxWidgets provides a rich set of classes which help to make cross-platform GUI programming easy. In a number of aspects, it is modelled after MFC, making transition from MFC to wxWidgets relatively painless. The main technical difference between most other free or commercial cross platform libraries is that wxWidgets is a wrapper around existing widget sets, whereas the other toolkits (Qt, Tk, Java, Amulet, OPaC, JX, Fresko) draw their widgets themselves which results in applications having a different look than native applications for that specific platform.
Furthermore, the developers are approaching the first alpha release of wxUniversal, a port of wxWidgets that implements all its widgets itself instead of using the various native GUIs. This will be used for embedded ports such as on the Linux framebuffer or for special effect apps.
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