WxWidgets

Last updated
wxWidgets
Original author(s) Julian Smart [1] [2] [3]
Developer(s) Various developers and contributors [4]
Initial release1992;32 years ago (1992) [5]
Stable release 3.2.6 (9 September 2024;4 days ago (2024-09-09) [6] ) [±]
Repository
Written in C++
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Development library
License wxWidgets Licence
Website wxwidgets.org

wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) is a widget toolkit and tools library 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 no significant code changes. A wide choice of compilers and other tools to use with wxWidgets facilitates development of sophisticated applications. [7] wxWidgets supports a comprehensive range of popular operating systems and graphical libraries, both proprietary and free.

Contents

The project was started under the name wxWindows in 1992 by Julian Smart at the University of Edinburgh. [1] The project was renamed wxWidgets in 2004 in response to a trademark claim by Microsoft UK.

It is free and open source software, distributed under the terms of the wxWidgets Licence, which satisfies those who wish to produce for GPL and proprietary software. [8]

Portability and deployment

wxWidgets covers systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS (Carbon and Cocoa), iOS (Cocoa Touch), Linux/Unix (X11, Motif, and GTK), OpenVMS, OS/2 and AmigaOS. A version for embedded systems is under development. [9]

wxWidgets is used across various industry sectors, most notably by Xerox, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Lockheed Martin, NASA and the Center for Naval Analyses. It is also used in the public sector and education by, for example, Dartmouth Medical School, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Center for Biotechnology Information, and many others. [7] wxWidgets is used in many open source projects, [10] and by individual developers.

History

wxWidgets (initially wxWindows; "w" is for Windows, and "x" is for X Window System) [11] was started in 1992 by Julian Smart at the University of Edinburgh. [1] He attained an honours degree in Computational science from the University of St Andrews in 1986, and is still a core developer. [2]

On 20 February 2004, the developers of wxWindows announced that the project was changing its name to wxWidgets, as a result of Microsoft requesting Julian Smart to respect Microsoft's United Kingdom trademark of the term Windows. [12]

Major release versions were 2.4 on 6 January 2003, 2.6 on 21 April 2005 and 2.8.0 on 14 December 2006. Version 3.0 was released on 11 November 2013.

wxWidgets has participated in the Google Summer of Code since 2006. [13] [14]

License

wxWindows Licence
Debian FSG compatible Yes
FSF approved Yes
OSI approved Yes
GPL compatible Yes
Copyleft Yes
Linking from code with a different licence Yes
Website www.wxwidgets.org   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

wxWidgets is distributed under a custom made wxWindows Licence, similar to the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), with an exception stating that derived works in binary form may be distributed on the user's own terms. [8] This license is a free software license approved by the FSF, [15] making wxWidgets free software. It has been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). [16]

Official support

Supported platforms

wxWidgets is supported on the following platforms: [17] [18]

External ports

  • Amiga – wxWidgets-AOS: AmigaOS port (Work In Progress) [19]

Supported compilers

wxWidgets is officially confirmed to work properly with the following compilers: [20] [21]

ToolkitCompilerVersion
wxMSWMicrosoft Visual Studio – Visual C++5.0+
Borland C++ (dropped in 3.1.5)5.5+
C++Builder2006+
Watcom C++, OpenWatcom10.6+
CodeWarrior7+
Cygwin1.5+
MinGW2.0+
Digital Mars C/C++ compiler8.40+
wxGTKg++2.95+
Clang++3.3+
Intel C++ Compiler9.1+
Sun Studio C/C++5.9
HP aC++3.8
IBM XL C/C++8.0

Programming language bindings

wxPython logo WxPython-logo.png
wxPython logo

The wxWidgets library is implemented in C++, with bindings available for many commonly used programming languages. [22]

wxWidgets is best described as a native mode toolkit as it provides a thin abstraction to a platform's native widgets, contrary 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. [23]

The toolkit is also not restricted to GUI development, having an inter-process communication layer, socket networking functionality, and more.

RAD tools and IDEs for wxWidgets

CodeLite under Windows XP Codelite2.0-Screenshot.png
CodeLite under Windows XP
Code::Blocks running under Ubuntu Cbmain.png
Code::Blocks running under Ubuntu

There are many Rapid Application Development (RAD) and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) tools available. Notable tools include: [24] [25]

Applications built using wxWidgets

Amaya under Windows 7 Amaya inuse.png
Amaya under Windows 7

Notable applications that use wxWidgets:

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Qt (software)</span> Object-oriented framework for software development

Qt is a cross-platform application development framework for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems with little or no change in the underlying codebase while still being a native application with native capabilities and speed.

In computing, cross-platform software is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software requires a separate build for each platform, but some can be directly run on any platform without special preparation, being written in an interpreted language or compiled to portable bytecode for which the interpreters or run-time packages are common or standard components of all supported platforms.

In computer programming, an application framework consists of a software framework used by software developers to implement the standard structure of application software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Standard Widget Toolkit</span> Graphical widget toolkit for use with the Java platform

The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a graphical widget toolkit for use with the Java platform. It was originally developed by Stephen Northover at IBM and is now maintained by the Eclipse Foundation in tandem with the Eclipse IDE. It is an alternative to the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) and Swing Java graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits provided by Sun Microsystems as part of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FLTK</span>

Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK) is a cross-platform widget library for graphical user interfaces (GUIs), developed by Bill Spitzak and others. Made to accommodate 3D graphics programming, it has an interface to OpenGL, but it is also suitable for general GUI programming.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PyQt</span> Python GUI library

PyQt is a Python binding of the cross-platform GUI toolkit Qt, implemented as a Python plug-in. PyQt is free software developed by the British firm Riverbank Computing. It is available under similar terms to Qt versions older than 4.5; this means a variety of licenses including GNU General Public License (GPL) and commercial license, but not the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). PyQt supports Microsoft Windows as well as various kinds of UNIX, including Linux and MacOS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fox toolkit</span>

The FOX toolkit is an open-source, cross-platform widget toolkit, i.e. a library of basic elements for building a graphical user interface (GUI). FOX stands for Free Objects for X.

wxPython Python wrapper for wxWidgets

wxPython is a wrapper for the cross-platform GUI API wxWidgets for the Python programming language. It is one of the alternatives to Tkinter. It is implemented as a Python extension module.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graphical user interface builder</span> Software development tool

A graphical user interface builder, also known as GUI designer or sometimes RAD IDE, is a software development tool that simplifies the creation of GUIs by allowing the designer to arrange graphical control elements using a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor. Without a GUI builder, a GUI must be built by manually specifying each widget's parameters in the source code, with no visual feedback until the program is run. Such tools are usually called the term RAD IDE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Magic User Interface</span> Widget toolkit for AmigaOS

The Magic User Interface is an object-oriented system by Stefan Stuntz to generate and maintain graphical user interfaces. With the aid of a preferences program, the user of an application has the ability to customize the system according to personal taste.

gtkmm is the official C++ interface for the popular GUI library GTK. gtkmm is free software distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Code::Blocks</span> Free, open source, cross-platform IDE

Code::Blocks is a free, open-source, cross-platform IDE that supports multiple compilers including GCC, Clang and Visual C++. It is developed in C++ using wxWidgets as the GUI toolkit. Using a plugin architecture, its capabilities and features are defined by the provided plugins. Currently, Code::Blocks is oriented towards C, C++, and Fortran. It has a custom build system and optional Make support.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XVT</span>

XVT is a software development environment for building cross-platform GUI applications in C or C++. XVT allows developers to graphically lay out an application's GUI, and provides cross-platform libraries to aid development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JUCE</span> C++ Cross-Platform Application Development Framework

JUCE is an open-source cross-platform C++ application framework, used for the development of desktop and mobile applications. JUCE is used in particular for its GUI and plug-ins libraries. It is dual licensed under the GPLv3 and a commercial license.

fpGUI Graphical user interface toolkit in Object Pascal

fpGUI, the Free Pascal GUI toolkit, is a cross-platform graphical user interface toolkit developed by Graeme Geldenhuys. fpGUI is open source and free software, licensed under a Modified LGPL license. The toolkit has been implemented using the Free Pascal compiler, meaning it is written in the Object Pascal language.

Enthought, Inc. is a software company based in Austin, Texas, United States that develops scientific and analytic computing solutions using primarily the Python programming language. It is best known for the early development and maintenance of the SciPy library of mathematics, science, and engineering algorithms and for its Python for scientific computing distribution Enthought Canopy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hollywood (programming language)</span> Programming language

Hollywood is a commercially distributed programming language developed by Andreas Falkenhahn which mainly focuses on the creation of multimedia-oriented applications. Hollywood is available for AmigaOS, MorphOS, WarpOS, AROS, Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. Hollywood has an inbuilt cross compiler that can automatically save executables for all platforms supported by the software. The generated executables are completely stand-alone and do not have any external dependencies, so they can also be started from a USB flash drive. An optional add-on also allows users to compile projects into APK files.

wxFormBuilder Open source GUI design application

wxFormBuilder is an open source GUI designer application for wxWidgets toolkit, which allows creating cross-platform applications. A streamlined, easy to use interface enables faster development and easier maintenance of software. It is written in C++.

wxPHP is an extension the programming language PHP that wraps the wxWidgets library, which allows writing cross-platform software desktop applications that make use of the native graphical components available to the different platforms. It supports the three major operating systems: Windows, Linux, and macOS by using PHP. Applications are written in PHP, which is an interpreted language. Thus, it needs no intermediate compiling step to run an application, if the PHP interpreter has the extension available.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "About the wxWidgets Project". wxwidgets.org. Retrieved 2010-01-02.
  2. 1 2 "About Julian Smart, www.anthemion.co.uk". anthemion.co.uk. Retrieved 2009-06-08.
  3. "Julian Smart". bookfayre.cz. Retrieved 2009-06-08.
  4. "The Team - wxWidgets". wxwidgets.org.
  5. "History - wxWidgets". www.wxwidgets.org.
  6. "wxWidgets: 3.2.6 Released". 2024-09-09. Retrieved 2024-09-13.
  7. 1 2 "About Who uses wxWidgets?". wxwidgets.org. Retrieved 2011-04-12.
  8. 1 2 ""License" page on website". The wxWindows Licence is essentially the LGPL, with an exception stating that derived works in binary form may be distributed on the user's own terms.
  9. 1 2 "wxEmbedded | embedded cross platform GUI library homepage". www.wxembedded.com.
  10. "List of open source applications that uses wxWidgets". SourceForge.net. Retrieved 2011-04-22.
  11. "History - wxWidgets". www.wxwidgets.org. Retrieved 2023-03-31.
  12. Smart, Julian; Dunn, Robin (August 2004). "Name change". Sourceforge.net. Retrieved 2007-04-23.
  13. Smart, Julian (2006-10-10). "Google Summer of Code 2006: wxWidgets projects summary". wxwidgets.org. Retrieved 2011-04-11.
  14. "Google Summer of Code 2006" . Retrieved 2011-04-11.
  15. "Various Licenses and Comments about Them – GNU Project - Free Software Foundation".
  16. "Open Source Initiative OSI – The wxWindows Library Licence:Licensing". Open Source Initiative. Retrieved 2011-04-28.
  17. "wxWidgets: Introduction". docs.wxwidgets.org. Retrieved 2016-01-14.
  18. "wxWidgets: Platform Details". docs.wxwidgets.org. Retrieved 2016-01-14.
  19. "wxWidgets-AOS: AmigaOS port" . Retrieved 2011-04-24.
  20. "Supported Platforms". wxwidgets.org. Retrieved 2011-04-24.
  21. "Development: Supported Classes - WxWiki". wiki.wxwidgets.org.
  22. "wxWidgets General Information". wxwidgets.org. Retrieved 2015-08-01.
  23. "WxWidgets Compared To Other Toolkits". wxwidgets.org. Retrieved 2010-01-02.
  24. "Tools for wxWidgets". wxwidgets.org. Retrieved 2011-04-12.
  25. "List of Integrated Development Environments". wxwidgets.org. Retrieved 2011-04-12.

Further reading