CrossPlatform GUI Programming with wxWidgets [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Why Use wxWidgets?

One area where wxWidgets differs from many other frameworks, such as MFC or OWL, is its multi-platform nature. wxWidgets has an Application Programming Interface (API) that is the same, or very nearly the same, on all supported platforms. This means that you can write an application on Windows, for example, and with very few changes (if any) recompile it on Linux or Mac OS X. This has a huge cost benefit compared with completely rewriting an application for each platform, and it also means that you do not need to learn a different API for each platform. Furthermore, it helps to future-proof your applications. As the computing landscape changes, wxWidgets changes with it, allowing your application to be ported to the latest and greatest systems supporting the newest features.

Another distinguishing feature is that wxWidgets provides a native look and feel. Some frameworks use the same widget code running on all platforms, perhaps with a theme makeover to simulate each platform's native appearance. By contrast, wxWidgets uses the native widgets wherever possible (and its own widget set in other cases) so that not only does the application look native on the major platforms, but it actually is native. This is incredibly important for user acceptance because even small, almost imperceptible differences in the way an application behaves, compared with the platform standard, can create an alienating experience for the user. To illustrate, Figure 1-1 shows a wxWidgets application called StoryLines, a tool to help fiction writers plot their stories, running on Windows XP.

It's recognizably a Windows application, with GUI elements such as tabs, scrollbars, and drop-down lists conforming to the current Windows theme. Similarly, Figure 1-2 shows StoryLines as a Mac OS X application, with the expected Aqua look and feel. There is no menu bar attached to the StoryLines window because it follows the Mac OS convention of showing the current window's menu bar at the top of the screen.

Finally, Figure 1-3 shows StoryLines as a GTK+ application running on Red Hat Linux.