Differences between current version and revision by previous author of ToolKit.
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Newer page: | version 4 | Last edited on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 12:56:35 pm | by AristotlePagaltzis | |
Older page: | version 2 | Last edited on Monday, October 27, 2003 11:28:13 am | by StuartYeates | Revert |
@@ -3,9 +3,12 @@
In a [GUI] application written without a ToolKit the actual program is a long loop that continuously calls a function to poll incoming events and then feeds them into a huge switch construct that decides how to react to each event. Every single facet of the application's behaviour has to be reflected here. Needless to say, writing non-trivial applications this way is tiresome at best.
A [GUI] ToolKit's main responsibility is to abstract away this event loop in a way that it can be maintained and extended easily. To this end, the different "widgets" (such as buttons, labels, menus etc) of a [GUI] are treated as black boxes. An EventModel is then specified, which defines how events "propagate" across these blackboxes. The EventModel is a large factor in the design of an application's architecture. Different [ToolKit]s tend to use very different [EventModel]s, which can cause a great deal of confusion.
-[GUI
] Toolkits
include:
-# Tk (
[Perl
], TCL)
-# awt (
Java)
-# swing (awt
, [Java])
-#
+Popular
[ToolKit
]s
include
+*
[GTK
], the GimpToolKit, written in [C] but with bindings for many other languages, is the first choice for most any serious application on Linux and foundation of the [GNOME] DesktopEnvironment
+* [Qt], written in and for [C++], is the ToolKit the [KDE] DesktopEnvironment is built on top of
+* [Tk], a rather crufty and baroque ToolKit, was originally made for [
TCL], but now has bindings for several other scripting languages, most notably [Perl]
+* [AWT], the first ToolKit of the [
Java] class library
+* Swing
, a more modern ToolKit that superseedes [AWT] in the
[Java] class library
+* [Motif], which is only of historical interest anymore
+* LessTif, a [Free] [Motif] clone, barely more interesting