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[wxWidgets.git] / docs / readme.txt

wxWidgets 2.7.0
---------------------------------------------------------

Welcome to wxWidgets, a sophisticated cross-platform C++
framework for writing advanced GUI applications using
native controls where possible.

In addition to common and advanced GUI facilities such as
frames, scrolling windows, toolbars, tree controls, icons,
device contexts, printing, splitter windows and so on, there are
wrappers for common file operations, and facilities for writing
TCP/IP applications, thread handling, and more. Where certain
features are not available on a platform, such as MDI and tree
controls on Unix, they are emulated.

A detailed 2000-page reference manual is supplied in HTML, PDF
and Windows Help form: see the docs hierarchy.

For a quick start, point your Web browser at docs/html/index.htm
for a list of important documents and samples.

Releases in the 2.7 series are considered development releases,
and as such, each new release may contain significant new
features or code changes which have not yet received thorough
testing and/or may break ABI or API compatibility with previous
releases. Therefore, we recommend that you keep this in mind if
you are to base your software on a 2.7 release, and thoroughly
test the parts of the wx library your application uses.  Rest
assured however that these potentially incompatible changes are
made in order to evolve the toolkit to the next ABI stable
release series (2.8.x) and that normally efforts are made to
preserve compilation compatibility, so often moving to a new
development release just requires a full recompile of the
application using wxWidgets.


Changes in this release
-----------------------

Please see changes.txt and "Changes since 2.6" in the manual
for details.

Platforms supported
-------------------

wxWidgets currently supports the following platforms:

- Windows 95/98/ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP,
  Pocket PC, Smartphone
- Most Unix variants with GTK+ 1 and GTK+ 2
- Most Unix variants with X11 (beta)
- Most Unix variants with Motif/Lesstif
- MacOS 9.x and 10.x using Carbon (10.3 and above preferred)
- MacOS 10.x using Cocoa (beta)
- OS/2 (beta)
- PalmOS (alpha)

Most popular C++ compilers are supported; see the install.txt
file for each platform (available via docs/html/index.htm) for details.
See also http://www.wxwidgets.org/platform.htm.

Note that 2.6 series were the last to fully support GTK+ 1.2, and Mac OS
9/Mac OS 10.2 and below. wxWidgets 2.7 and above focuses on GTK+ 2 and Mac OS
10.3 and above and compatibility with earlier systems is not guaranteed any
more.

Files
-----

The distribution is available in archive formats appropriate to the
target system. See the download pages for details.

Installation
------------

wxWidgets needs to be compiled before you can test out the samples
or write your own applications. For installation information, please
see the install.txt file in the individual directories:

  docs/msw
  docs/gtk
  docs/motif
  docs/mac
  docs/cocoa
  docs/x11
  docs/mgl
  docs/os2
  docs/palmos

Licence information
-------------------

For licensing information, please see the files:

  docs/preamble.txt
  docs/licence.txt
  docs/licendoc.txt
  docs/gpl.txt
  docs/lgpl.txt

Although this may seem complex, it is there to allow authors of
proprietary/commercial applications to use wxWidgets in addition
to those writing GPL'ed applications. In summary, the licence is
LGPL plus a clause allowing unrestricted distribution of
application binaries. To answer a FAQ, you don't have to
distribute any source if you wish to write commercial
applications using wxWidgets. 

However, if you distribute wxGTK or wxMotif (with Lesstif)
version of your application, don't forget that it is linked
against GTK+ (or Lesstif) which is covered by LGPL *without*
exception notice. Under Linux systems your app is probably linked
against LGPL glibc as well. Please read carefully LGPL, section
6. which describes conditions for distribution of closed source
applications linked against LGPL library. Basically you should
link dynamically and include source code of LGPL libraries with
your product (unless it is already present in user's system -
like glibc usually is). If compiled with --enable-odbc (Unix
only), wxWidgets library will contain iODBC library which is
covered by LGPL.

If you use TIFF image handler, please see src/tiff/COPYRIGHT
for libtiff licence details.

If you use JPEG image handler, documentation for your program
should contain following sentence: "This software is based in
part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group". See
src/jpeg/README for details.

If you use wxRegEx class on a system without native regular
expressions support (i.e. MS Windows), see src/regex/COPYRIGHT
file for Henry Spencer's regular expression library copyright.

If you use wxXML classes or XRC, see src/expat/COPYING for licence details.

Documentation
-------------

See docs/html/index.htm for an HTML index of the major documents.

See docs/changes.txt for a summary of changes to wxWidgets.

See docs/tech for an archive of technical notes.

The wxWidgets bug database can be browsed at:

  http://sourceforge.net/bugs/?group_id=9863

The Windows HTML Help files are located in docs/htmlhelp.
The Windows Help files are located in docs/winhelp.
The PDF help files are located in docs/pdf.
The HTB (wxWidgets HTML Help) files are located in docs/htb.

Further information
-------------------

The wxWidgets Web site is located at:

  http://www.wxwidgets.org

The main wxWidgets ftp site is at:

  ftp://biolpc22.york.ac.uk/pub

A wxWidgets CD-ROM with the latest distribution plus an HTML
front-end and hundreds of MB of compilers, utilities and other
material may be ordered from the CD-ROM page: see the wxWidgets
web site.

Have fun!

The wxWidgets Team, September 2005