View Source: ToolKit - Waikato Linux Users Group

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[GUI] [ToolKit]s are libraries written to ease the task of writing [GUI] applications by abstracting the drudgework away from the programmer. As an added bonus, they offer a consistent look between applications that use the same one.

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.

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* [Tk], a rather crufty and baroque ToolKit, was originally made for [TCL], but now has bindings for several other scripting languages, most notably [Perl]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

12 pages link to ToolKit:

Last edited on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 12:56:35 pm by AristotlePagaltzis

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