Everything about Wxwidgets totally explained
| programming_language =
C++
| operating_system =
Cross-platform
| genre = Development
library
| license =
wxWindows Library Licence
| website = http://www.wxwidgets.org/
}}
wxWidgets (formerly
wxWindows) is a
widget toolkit for creating
graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for
cross-platform applications. wxWidgets enables a program's GUI code to compile and run on several computer platforms with minimal or no code changes. It covers systems such as
Microsoft Windows,
Mac OS,
Linux/
Unix (
X11,
Motif, and
GTK+),
OpenVMS,
OS/2 and
AmigaOS. A version for
embedded systems is under development.
History
wxWidgets (initially wxWindows) was started in 1992 by Julian Smart at the University of Edinburgh. He attained an honours degree in
Computational Science from the
University of St Andrews in the year
1986, and is still a core developer.
On
February 20 2004, the developers of wxWindows announced that the project was changing its name to
wxWidgets, as a result of requests from
Microsoft of Julian Smart to respect Microsoft's
United Kingdom trademark of the term
Windows.
License
wxWidgets is distributed under a custom made licence, similar to the
GNU Lesser General Public License, with an exception stating that derived works in binary form may be distributed on the user's own terms. This licence is a
free software licence, making wxWidgets
free software.
Implementation
The wxWidgets
library is implemented in
C++, with
bindings available for many commonly used
programming languages, among them,
Python (
wxPython),
Erlang (
wxErlang),
Haskell (
wxHaskell),
Lua (
wxLua),
Perl (
wxPerl),
Ruby (
wxRuby),
Smalltalk (
wxSqueak),
Java (
wx4j) and even
JavaScript (
wxJavaScript). For a complete list, with links to the respective project sites, see the external references at the end of this article. There is also
PLT Scheme, which uses an incompatible branch of wxWindows (version 1), created in 1995. The toolkit is deeply integrated with the language run-time (garbage collection, resource administration) unlike in other languages, which simply provide a library binding.
wxWidgets is best described as a
native mode toolkit as it provides a thin abstraction to a platform's native widgets, as opposed to emulating the display of widgets using graphic primitives. Calling a native widget on the target platform results in a more native looking interface than toolkits such as
Swing (for Java), as well as offering performance and other benefits.
The toolkit is also not restricted to GUI development, having a built-in
ODBC-based database library, an
inter-process communication layer,
socket networking functionality, and more.
Software using wxWidgets
A great many applications currently use wxWidgets as their GUI library, some of which are
listed here.
RAD tools and IDEs for wxWidgets
Further Information
Get more info on 'Wxwidgets'.
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