[wxWidgets.git] / docs / publicity / WoWoW30.html

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
	<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8">
	<TITLE></TITLE>
	<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="OpenOffice.org 2.3  (Linux)">
	<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
	<META NAME="CREATED" CONTENT="20080829;16130000">
	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
	<META NAME="CHANGED" CONTENT="20090209;11181400">
	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Julian Smart">
	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
	<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
	<!--
		@page { margin: 2cm }
		P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }
		H2 { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }
		H2.western { font-family: "Albany AMT", sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic }
		H2.cjk { font-family: "Albany AMT"; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic }
		H2.ctl { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic }
		H3.western { font-family: "Albany", sans-serif }
		H3.cjk { font-family: "HG Mincho Light J" }
		H3.ctl { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS" }
	-->
	</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY LANG="de-DE" DIR="LTR">
<H2 CLASS="western">The Wonderful World of wxWidgets 3.0</H2>
<H3 CLASS="western">What is wxWidgets?</H3>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Although it is quite unlikely that you'll read this
document if you don't know what wxWidgets is, let's just briefly
mention that wxWidgets is a C++ framework for building rich GUI
applications from a single source which can then be compiled on
different operating systems, resulting in a native application on
each system. wxWidgets uses native controls (or widgets) and other
native functions whereever possible so that the resulting
applications will look and feel as native as possible, and they are
usually not distinguishable from applications written using single
platform toolkits such as MFC for Windows, GTK+ for Linux or Cocoa
under OS X. In some areas (such as graphics art or the installer),
adaptations to the individual platforms have to be made in order to
achieve perfect integration with that platform.</P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>The major operating system for which wxWidgets
supports are Windows (Windows 95, NT, 2000, XP, Vista) including its
mobile variants (Windows CE, PocketPC, Windows Mobile), Linux and
Unix using the GTK+ 2 toolkit (minimum version is GTK+ 2.4, more
recent features are used when available) and Mac OS X (minimum
version 10.4 Tiger, both Intel, PPC and the Universal Binaries for
both are supported). wxWidgets includes many code pieces for
optimising dialog and general layout for small screens such as those
of the recent netbooks and mobile phones and tablets.</P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>There is varying support for other platforms or
toolkits such as OS/2, Motif, GTK 1.2, PalmOS and various mobile
Linux variants using GTK+ or the Hildon framework and also a version
for OS X using the Cocoa API and even the iPhone SDK.</P>
<H3 CLASS="western">Documentation in Doxygen</H3>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Until wxWidgets 3.0 all
documentation was written in a customized LaTeX variant created for
the project years ago. Although there were tools which could parse
classes automatically and create a documentation skeleton, class
documentation was troublesome to update and therefore often outdated.
In order to improve this situation, the entire documentation
including references and overviews was converted to a customized
Doxygen format inlined in a special set of headers. Although many
classes were converted in a single automated step, every class
documentation had to be corrected by hand making this effort one of
the biggest in the development cycle leading up wxWidgets 3.0.
Additionally, tools were written to automatically compare the
signature of the many class methods to the documentation. The result
is more correct documentation with better formating and built-in
searching and screenshots of many controls. Since Doxygen is a
wide-spread format and easy to learn, the new documentation is much
easier to edit, correct and read. See the <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/index.html">wxWidgets
on-line documentation</A> to which this document refers to in many
places.</P>
<H3 CLASS="western">C++ features and template support</H3>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">The wxWidgets project
tries to both move with new developments of the C++ language as well
as to support older compilers to an extent which does not inhibit
further development and indeed the usefulness of the entire project.
Since support for templates used to be limited to a few compilers and
was often buggy even in them, wxWidgets initially stayed away from
using templates entirely including the use of the Standard Template
Library (STL). In the meantime nearly all compilers have gained solid
template support and therefore wxWidgets is now using templates for
container classes (such as <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_vector_3_01_t_01_4.html">wxVector&lt;T&gt;</A>),
smart pointers (such as <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_shared_ptr_3_01_t_01_4.html">wxSharedPtr&lt;T&gt;</A>),
weak references (see <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_weak_ref_3_01_t_01_4.html">wxWeakRef&lt;T&gt;</A>)
and many other places where templates are useful. This means that
very old compilers won't be able to compile wxWidgets anymore or only
in a degraded way (such as Visual C++ 6.0).</P>
<H3 CLASS="western">Platform features and backwards compatibility</H3>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">In the same way wxWidgets
tries to both make use of new features of the different operating
systems and support older systems for as long as possible and as long
as supporting them does not hinder development for up-to-date
systems. This is especially true for OS X and GTK+ 2 and it was
therefore decided that OS X versions older than 10.4 Tiger and GTK+ 2
version older than 2.4 are no longer supported. The wxWidgets team
also realized that it could not do everything and that support for a
cross-platform database API was beyond the scope and focus of the
project so that its old wxODBC database connectivity classes were
removed from the project. There are many cross-platform database
libraries available and many of them are better than the old wxODBC
and all of them are better maintained.</P>
<H3 CLASS="western">Unicode: A Single Build for Everyone</H3>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Until version 3.0 there
have always been two different versions (or builds) of wxWidgets: one
with full support for Unicode where each character was represented by
a wchar_t internally (using two bytes under Windows and four bytes
almost everywhere else) and another called the „ANSI“ build where
each character was represented by a single byte. This model was
chosen following the original Windows API model and at a point of
time when Unicode support was hardly present anywhere else. In the
meantime, the Windows world together with projects such as Java have
chosen UTF-16 as the native representation for Unicode strings
whereas much of the free software world including GTK+ and parts of
Mac OS X have chosen UTF-8. It was therefore decided to drastically
change the implementation of wxWidgets' string class and make it use
UTF-16 under Windows (mostly as before) but UTF-8 elsewhere (instead
of wide character strings using wchar_t) so that strings received
from and sent to Unix and GTK+ library calls would no longer have to
be converted back and forth between different Unicode representations
(see <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_string.html">wxString</A>
and <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/overview_unicode.html">Unicode
overview</A>). Additionally, the „ANSI“ mode was removed and the
wxString class as well as some other classes were modified to accept
and return both Unicode and 8-bit string literals if required. The
same was done to functions like wxPrintf() etc. Although this change
will eventually not be seen by the end user of an application written
using wxWidgets, it is such a fundamental change that it was the
primary reason to give wxWidgets the new major version number 3.</P>
<H3 CLASS="western">New 2D Drawing Code</H3>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Although a 2D drawing API
has always been part of wxWidgets (using so-called device contexts
such as a window or a bitmap and pens and brushes to draw into them,
see <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_d_c.html">wxDC</A>,
<A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_pen.html">wxPen</A>,
<A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_brush.html">wxBrush</A>),
it has not changed much since its initial inception and so the code
was completely reorganized using a single set of frontend classes and
different backends which will make maintainance much easier without
having to care for binary backwards compatibility and it also helped
isolate a number of subtle platform differences. The old drawing API
is good enough for many tasks and reflects the drawing capabilites of
the 1990's but it didn't make use of advanced features such as
transparency, anti-aliasing and free matrix transforms of modern 2D
graphics systems such as GDI+ on Windows, Cairo on Linux (and
elsewhere) and CoreGraphics on OS X. Therefore a completely new
drawing API (the so called graphics contexts, see <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_graphics_context.html">wxGraphicsContext</A>)
was added to wxWidgets making use of modern drawing engines. This is
complemented by a bitmap class with alpha channel support and fast
raw access to the bitmap's internal data representation. Additionally
the API of all existing GDI class constants was corrected so that
wxMODERN becomes wxFONTFAMILY_MODERN, wxSOLID becomes
wxBRUSHSTYLE_SOLID etc. and the reference counting system was
streamlined and made identical on all platforms.</P>
<H3 CLASS="western">Changes to wxBase</H3>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>wxBase is the name of the non-GUI part of wxWidgets
libary which provides basic class such as the aforementioned wxString
class, container classes, as well as classes for threading,
networking, XML parsing, path and configuration management, logging,
debugging etc. These functions and classes have been separated into
their own library both for being able to write non-GUI apps as well
as to make maintainance easier through reduced interdependence. 
</P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Many of the changes to wxString and the container
classes are located in wxBase, but on top of that support to wxBase
was added for events loops, timers and sockets for writing
event-based client or server apps with wxWidgets 3.0. The socket code
itself has been reorganized removing a lot of duplicated code and
dropping the previous implementation which was separated into a C and
a C++ part.</P>
<H3 CLASS="western">New controls and other major GUI additions for
all ports</H3>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>This document cannot list every bug fix and minor
change. Rather, this paragraph summarizes the most relevant changes
to the GUI classes of wxWidgets. Given wxWidgets' nature as a GUI
library, these changes are also most likely to be visible to the user
and may thus be the most important changes from a user's perspective
(although not necessarily from a developer's perspective): 
</P>
<UL>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>wxDataViewCtrl and wxDataViewTreeCtrl: this
	control can partially replace both wxListCtrl and wxTreeCtrl (for
	which there only was a native version of Windows and partially for
	OS X) but also extends and combines the classes by being able to
	display a hierarchy and list at the same time and by offering a much
	more flexible way to display and edit data on a per column basis.
	Reimplementing wxTreeCtrl and possibly wxListCtrl in terms of
	wxDataViewCtrl was considered, but this was dropped as certain
	special features are not available on all platforms (or
	differently). See also <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_data_view_ctrl.html">wxDataViewCtrl</A>,
	<A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_data_view_list_ctrl.html">wxDataViewListCtrl</A>
	and <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_data_view_tree_ctrl.html">wxDataViewTreeCtrl</A>.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>The tabular view of wxGrid has been improved
	including a native header control, which has been separated into a
	new control. See also <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_grid.html">wxGrid</A>
	and <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_header_ctrl.html">wxHeaderCtrl.</A></P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added wxPropertyGrid which is a big generic
	control used to display lists and hierarchies of name-value pairs.
	Like wxDataViewCtrl, it offers a number of ready-to-use editors for
	editing text, numbers, lists, fonts, file names etc. using in-place
	editing or using pop-up dialog and combo boxes. Developement of
	wxPropertyGrid has so far taken place outside of wxWidgets as a
	separate project, but it has not been included in wxWidgets per se.
	See also <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_property_grid.html">wxPropertyGrid</A>.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>wxHyperlinkCtrl added, implemented natively
	under GTK+ and in a generic way on other platforms. It can be used
	to represent a hypertext link, for example to the homepage of the
	developer or company. See also <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_hyperlink_ctrl.html">wxHyperlinkCtrl</A>.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>wxFileCtrl for constructing fully customized
	file dialogs. Complementary to this, the possibility to add custom
	control to wxFileDialog has been added. See <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_file_ctrl.html">wxFileCtrl</A>
	and <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_file_dialog.html">wxFileDialog</A>.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Several enhancements to wxRichTextCtrl
	including support for super- and subscript and many speed-ups. See
	<A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_rich_text_ctrl.html">wxRichTextCtrl</A>.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>The possibility to display state icons has been
	added to wxTreeCtrl. This can also be used to implement check-box
	like behaviour. See <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_tree_ctrl.html">wxTreeCtrl</A>.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>wxCalendarCtrl has been rewritten using native
	code under MSW and GTK+ and enhanced in many ways (for example
	displaying week numbers). See <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_calendar_ctrl.html">wxCalendarCtrl</A>.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Implemented support for auto-completion for
	wxTextCtrl and wxComboBox.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added wxAUIToolBar to the set of wxAUI classes,
	which is better integrated and more flexible than the standard
	wxToolBar.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Reimplemented wxBitmapComboBox using native
	code under MSW and GTK+. See also <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_bitmap_combo_box.html">wxBitmapComboBox</A>.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added wxBitmapToggleButton on all platforms.
	See also <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_bitmap_toggle_button.html">wxBitmapToggleButton</A>.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added support for ellipsization on all
	platforms and for mark-up formatting under GTK+ to wxStaticText. See
	<A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_static_text.html">wxStaticText</A>.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Rewritten the selection event emission logic of
	wxListBox on all platforms to more exactly match each other when
	selecting and deselecting certain items.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Implemented wxCollapsiblePane natively for GTK
	and OS X. See <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_collapsible_pane.html">wxCollapsiblePane</A>.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added a new sizer which can wrap across
	multiple lines. See <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_wrap_sizer.html">wxWrapSizer</A>.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added multi-sample and anti-aliasing support
	the the OpenGL canvas and separated wxGLCanvas and wxGLContext. See
	<A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_g_l_canvas.html">wxGLCanvas</A>.</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added wxNativeContainerWindow in order to
	construct a wxTopLevelWindow from a native window handle (MSW and
	GTK+).</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>The <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_v_scrolled_window.html">wxVScrolledWindow</A>
	class has been completely rewritten to accommodate the addition of
	the new horizontal scrolling variants (<A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_h_scrolled_window.html">wxHScrolledWindow</A>
	and <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_h_v_scrolled_window.html">wxHVScrolledWindow</A>)
	while still providing complete backwards compatibility for
	wxVScrolledWindow.</P>
</UL>
<H3 CLASS="western">wxMac specific changes (now called wxOSX)</H3>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>One important change of the wxMac port is that the
port is not called wxMac anymore. Instead, the more appropriate term
wxOSX should be used as the operating system is called OS X nowadays
and – more importantly – wxWidgets now has partial support for
iPhone and iPod, and these are devices are clearly not Macs. Apart
from the name change – wxMac has undergone the most fundamental
changes of the three main ports, even if some of the changes were
mostly reorganizing code instead of writing new code. The code has
been reorganized into common code (common to Carbon, Cocoa and Cocoa
Touch) including both general wrapping or front-end classes for much
of the GUI code as well as a wrapper for the so called CoreFoundation
classes of OS X, which are responsible on all OS X variants for
string manipulation, font support, graphics and other basic
functionality (CoreImage and CoreVideo have recently been added by
Apple) and toolkit dependent code for the Carbon, Cocoa and Cocoa
Touch API. The Carbon variant is the core of what used to be wxMac
and is the most stable and mature version. The reason behind adding
optional support for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch is that Carbon is not
available on iPhones at all and that it has been deprecated for all
64-bit versions of OS X, which is likely to be the default a few
years from now. So while present applications using wxOSX are advised
to use the Carbon backend due its maturity, future developement will
have to focus on the Cocoa backend.</P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>As part of the restructuring, all remaining drawing
code using the old QuickDraw API has been removed (it was only an
option before) and drawing now always takes place using CoreGraphics.
Likewise, all code using Carbon functions no longer present in OS X
10.4 has been removed to clean-up the code greatly. This is turn
means, as mentioned above, that applications will require a minimum
of OS X 10.4 in order to run, better yet OS X 10.5.</P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Apart from these large changes, these additional
features can be noted:</P>
<UL>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Better support for IconRef</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>A fix for duplicate menu entries in non-English
	locales</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Accelerators allowed to be used for buttons</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>wxLocale::GetInfo() implemented using CFLocale</P>
</UL>
<H3 CLASS="western">wxGTK specific changes</H3>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">The task of the GTK+ port
of wxWidgets is to keep up with the development of the GTK+ library
since it has the habit of adding new controls or new APIs if the
existing code is too limited and cannot be fixed in a backward
compatible way. The main problem of this approach is that
applications written using wxGTK should work with relatively old
versions of GTK+ but should also make use of recent features. In some
cases, supporting an old version of GTK+ hinders development so we
decided to declare GTK+ 2.4 the minimum toolkit version that is
supported. As an example, this made it possible to always use the
GTK+ file dialog instead of the old generic file dialog which had to
be used when GTK+ didn't have a usable file dialog. 
</P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Other parts of wxGTK that
were rewritten or which underwent a major update include, but are not
limited to:</P>
<UL>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">wxToolbar now uses
	the „new“ GTK+ toolbar API</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">wxChoice now uses
	GtkComboBox instead of the deprecated GtkOptionMenu</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">wxComboBox now
	always uses GtkComboBox instead of the deprecated GtkCombo class</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">URL dragging using
	the „text/x-moz-url“ in wxURLDataObject</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Added a completely
	new printing backend using with dialogs GtkPrint and Cairo</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Rewritten idle event
	generation code</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Tab traversal is now
	done natively by GTK+ instead of by wxWidgets</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Rewrote layout of
	wxFrame's menubar, toolbar, client window and statusbar using a
	GtkVBox instead of our own calculation</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Correctly
	implemented SetSize() and GetSize() for toplevel windows in spite of
	the dreaded problems with window decorations belonging to the Window
	Manager and not the window itself</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Added an
	asynchronous API to wxClipboard to avoid having to call wxYield()
	from within it (which causes reentrance problems).</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Some support for
	Hildon control from the Maemo platform used for Nokia tablets</P>
	<LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Rewritten the
	wxTaskBarIconIcon class using GtkStatusIcon if available.</P>
</UL>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm"><BR>
</P>
<H3 CLASS="western">wxMSW specific changes</H3>
<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">wxMSW is the most mature platform,
mostly because it is used most often and thus has the biggest user,
tester and developer base, but also because the underlying Windows
system has been more successful at preserving backwards
compatibility. Therefore, the list of wxMSW-specific changes is
smaller and the changes usually minor details when compared to the
changes of the other two main ports:</P>
<UL>
	<LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Implemented more native looking
	wxCheckListBox and add ability to store client data in it</P>
	<LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Allow longer tooltips</P>
	<LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Support for multiline labels in
	wxCheckBox and wxToggleButton</P>
	<LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">More precise print preview</P>
	<LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Show resize gripper in resizable
	dialogs</P>
</UL>
<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm"><BR>
</P>
<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm"><BR>
</P>
<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm"><BR>
</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>