See the article on Widget s for a list of widgets.
''(This section deals mostly with High-level Widget Toolkit characteristics)''
A High-level Widget Toolkit is an API that manages the creation and behavior of a Graphical User Interface :
- The Graphical User Interface is often created as a Tree of Widgets , some of them supporting interaction with the user (labels, Buttons , Check Box , ...), others being Containers that group the other widgets ( Windows , Panels , ...).
- The content of the widgets tree, and the properties of the widgets, can often be modified at runtime (widgets can be added or removed from the tree).
- The toolkit handles the User Events , as for example when clicking on a Button . The action following the detection of the event is not the responsibility of the toolkit, but of the Application . ''For example, if the user selects a File in a File Dialog , the file dialog widget behavior and the detection of the user event are managed by the widget toolkit, but the actual action to perform on the file after selection must be performed by the application''.
Widget toolkits must have a means to position the Widgets in their Containers . The simplest way to define their positions is by defining their absolute (on the screen) or relative (to the parent) position in Pixel s or common distance units, but it is also often possible to lay out the widgets by setting their relative positions without using distance units (see Layout Manager ).
Also, the Look And Feel of the widgets can be hardcoded in the toolkit, but some widget toolkit APIs decouple the look and feel from the definition of the widgets, allowing the developer to define them at the initialisation of the application or even at runtime (see Pluggable Look And Feel ).
- --- The X Window System contains primitive building blocks, called Xt or "Intrinsics", but they are used only by Motif , most other toolkits such as GTK+ or Qt bypass them and use Xlib .
- --- The Amiga OS Intuition was formerly present in the Amiga Kickstart ROM and integrated itself with a medium-high level widget library which invoked the Workbench Amiga native GUI . Since Amiga OS 2.0, Intuition.library became disk based and object oriented. Also Workbench.library and Icon.library became disk based, and could be replaced with similar third-party solutions.
- --- BOOPSI (Basic Object Oriented Programming System for Intuition) was introduced with OS 2.0 and enhanced Intuition with a system of classes in which every class represents a single widget or describes an interface event. This led to an evolution in which third-party developers each realised their own personal systems of classes.
- --- Magic User Interface (MUI): system of Amiga Widget Classes.
- --- Zune (GUI Toolkit) is an object-oriented GUI toolkit which is part of the AROS project and nearly a Open Source clone, at both an API and look and feel level, of Magic User Interface .
- --- based GUIs.
- --- ReAction: Evolution of the ClassACT system.
- --- Triton
- --- BGUI
- --- StormWIZARD: IFF -based, developed by Thomas Mittelsdorf
- --- Feelin: XML -based, developed by Olivier Laviale
Note that the X Window system was originally primarily for Unix-like operating systems, but it now runs on Microsoft Windows as well using, for example, Cygwin , so some or all of these toolkits can also be used under Windows.
- Adobe Flash allows creating widgets running in most web browsers and in several mobile phones.
- Adobe Flex provides high level widgets for building web user interfaces. Flash widgets can be used in Flex.
- Flash and Flex widgets will run without a browser in the forthcoming Apollo runtime environment.
- The Free Software reimplementation of Flash, GNU Gnash , which is under development, can also run Flash widgets outside of a browser.
See Also: JavaScript library
- AirWRX is an application framework that runs from a USB Flash Drive , and turns its PC host and other nearby PCs into a multi-screen, web-like digital workspace.
- SPARK (software) is an application framework built upon SVG.
- The Abstract Windowing Toolkit is used in Java applications. It typically uses another toolkit on the selected platform in turn.
- Swing is Sun Microsystems 's replacement for AWT in newer Java versions.
- The Standard Widget Toolkit is a native widget toolkit for Java that was invented as part of the Eclipse project. SWT will use a standard toolkit for the running platform (such as the Windows API or GTK+) underneath.
- Agar is a set of cross-platform graphics libraries which includes a comprehensive GUI toolkit. Agar supports OpenGL rendering as well as simple Frame Buffer displays with SDL .
- CEGUI , Open Source ( MIT License ), configurable GUI designed for Game Development .
- CLX (Component Library for Cross-platform), used with Borland 's Delphi , C++ Builder , and Kylix , for producing cross-platform applications. It is based on Qt , wrapped in such a way that its programming interface is similar to that of the VCL toolkit.
- FLTK , Open Source ( LGPL ), cross-platform toolkit designed to be small and fast.
- FOX Toolkit , Open Source ( LGPL ), cross-platform toolkit.
- GLUI , a very small toolkit written the GLUT library.
- GTK+ , Open Source ( LGPL ), primarily for the X Window System, ported to and emulated under other platforms; used in the GNOME and XFCE desktop environments.
- Juce provides GUI and widget set with the same look and feel in Microsoft Windows, X Window Systems, and MacOSX
- Lgi (software) ( LGPL ), Ports for Windows, Cygwin, Linux (Xlib), BeOS and MacOSX (in progress). Compiles with VC++ 6 and 7, gcc 3 & 4 and XCode 1.5. Cross platform and native widgets (including stand alone HTML engine), graphical dialog designer, translatable Unicode applications, IDE, and small binaries.
- NovaTK , a GUI Toolkit for X11. It is written in C++ and depends only on Xlib.
- Qt , Open Source ( QPL , GPL ) available under Unix and Linux (with X Window), MS Windows, Mac OS X and embedded Linux systems; also available in commercial versions under these platforms; used in KDE .
- Tk , a widget set accessed from Tcl and other high-level script languages (interfaced in Python as Tkinter ).
- The Visual Component Framework (VCF) is an Open Source ( BSD License ) C++ framework project.
- WxWidgets (formerly wxWindows), Open Source (relaxed LGPL ), abstracts toolkits across several platforms for C++, Python and Perl .
- YAAF , Open Source ( YAAF Open Source License ), designed to facilitate creating cross-platform applications.
- Quinta , a lightweight application framework with GUI widgets ( BSD License )
- IP Pascal uses a graphics library built on top of standard language constructs. Also unusual for being a procedural toolkit that is cross platform (no callbacks or other tricks), and is completely upward compatible with standard serial input and output paradigms. Completely standard programs with serial output can be run and extended with graphical constructs.
- Lazarus (for Pascal, Object Pascal and Delphi Programming Language via Free Pascal compiler), as a class library wrapping GTK+ 1.2, Gtk+ 2.x and the Windows API (Carbon, Windows CE and Qt4 support are all in development).
- FpGUI is created with the Free Pascal Compiler. It doesn't rely on any large 3rdParty libraries and currently runs on Linux, Windows and Windows CE. A Carbon (Mac OS X) port in under way.
- Curl is an integrated language intended to replace both HTML and a programming language such as Java or JavaScript . It is designed to yield faster performance due to using compilation. Non-commercial use is free.
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