]> git.saurik.com Git - wxWidgets.git/blame_incremental - docs/publicity/WoWoW30.html
link with wininet.lib under Windows to avoid linking errors in wxUSE_URL_NATIVE=...
[wxWidgets.git] / docs / publicity / WoWoW30.html
... / ...
CommitLineData
1<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
2<HTML>
3<HEAD>
4 <META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8">
5 <TITLE></TITLE>
6 <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="OpenOffice.org 2.3 (Linux)">
7 <META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
8 <META NAME="CREATED" CONTENT="20080829;16130000">
9 <META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
10 <META NAME="CHANGED" CONTENT="20081227;19363700">
11 <META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Julian Smart">
12 <META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
13 <META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
14 <META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
15 <META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
16 <META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
17 <META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
18 <META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
19 <META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Robert Roebling">
20 <STYLE TYPE="text/css">
21 <!--
22 @page { margin: 2cm }
23 P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }
24 H2 { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }
25 H2.western { font-family: "Albany AMT", sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic }
26 H2.cjk { font-family: "Albany AMT"; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic }
27 H2.ctl { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic }
28 H3.western { font-family: "Albany", sans-serif }
29 H3.cjk { font-family: "HG Mincho Light J" }
30 H3.ctl { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS" }
31 -->
32 </STYLE>
33</HEAD>
34<BODY LANG="de-DE" DIR="LTR">
35<H2 CLASS="western">The Wonderful World of wxWidgets 3.0</H2>
36<H3 CLASS="western">What is wxWidgets?</H3>
37<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Although it is quite unlikely that you'll read this
38document if you don't know what wxWidgets is, let's just briefly
39mention that wxWidgets is a C++ framework for building rich GUI
40applications from a single source which can then be compiled on
41different operating systems, resulting in a native application on
42each system. wxWidgets uses native controls (or widgets) and other
43native functions whereever possible so that the resulting
44applications will look and feel as native as possible, and they are
45usually not distinguishable from applications written using single
46platform toolkits such as MFC for Windows, GTK+ for Linux or Cocoa
47under OS X. In some areas (such as graphics art or the installer),
48adaptations to the individual platforms have to be made in order to
49achieve perfect integration with that platform.</P>
50<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>The major operating system for which wxWidgets
51supports are Windows (Windows 95, NT, 2000, XP, Vista) including its
52mobile variants (Windows CE, PocketPC, Windows Mobile), Linux and
53Unix using the GTK+ 2 toolkit (minimum version is GTK+ 2.4, more
54recent features are used when available) and Mac OS X (minimum
55version 10.4 Tiger, both Intel, PPC and the Universal Binaries for
56both are supported). wxWidgets includes many code pieces for
57optimising dialog and general layout for small screens such as those
58of the recent netbooks and mobile phones and tablets.</P>
59<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>There is varying support for other platforms or
60toolkits such as OS/2, Motif, GTK 1.2, PalmOS and various mobile
61Linux variants using GTK+ or the Hildon framework and also a version
62for OS X using the Cocoa API and even the iPhone SDK.</P>
63<H3 CLASS="western">Documentation in Doxygen</H3>
64<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Until wxWidgets 3.0 all
65documentation was written in a customized LaTeX variant created for
66the project years ago. Although there were tools which could parse
67classes automatically and create a documentation skeleton, class
68documentation was troublesome to update and therefore often outdated.
69In order to improve this situation, the entire documentation
70including references and overviews was converted to a customized
71Doxygen format inlined in a special set of headers. Although many
72classes were converted in a single automated step, every class
73documentation had to be corrected by hand making this effort one of
74the biggest in the development cycle leading up wxWidgets 3.0.
75Additionally, tools were written to automatically compare the
76signature of the many class methods to the documentation. The result
77is more correct documentation with better formating and built-in
78searching and screenshots of many controls. Since Doxygen is a
79wide-spread format and easy to learn, the new documentation is much
80easier to edit, correct and read. See the <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/index.html">wxWidgets
81on-line documentation</A> to which this document refers to in many
82places.</P>
83<H3 CLASS="western">C++ features and template support</H3>
84<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">The wxWidgets project
85tries to both move with new developments of the C++ language as well
86as to support older compilers to an extent which does not inhibit
87further development and indeed the usefulness of the entire project.
88Since support for templates used to be limited to a few compilers and
89was often buggy even in them, wxWidgets initially stayed away from
90using templates entirely including the use of the Standard Template
91Library (STL). In the meantime nearly all compilers have gained solid
92template support and therefore wxWidgets is now using templates for
93container classes (such as <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_vector_3_01_t_01_4.html">wxVector&lt;T&gt;</A>),
94smart pointers (such as <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_shared_ptr_3_01_t_01_4.html">wxSharedPtr&lt;T&gt;</A>),
95weak references (see <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_weak_ref_3_01_t_01_4.html">wxWeakRef&lt;T&gt;</A>)
96and many other places where templates are useful. This means that
97very old compilers won't be able to compile wxWidgets anymore or only
98in a degraded way (such as Visual C++ 6.0).</P>
99<H3 CLASS="western">Platform features and backwards compatibility</H3>
100<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">In the same way wxWidgets
101tries to both make use of new features of the different operating
102systems and support older systems for as long as possible and as long
103as supporting them does not hinder development for up-to-date
104systems. This is especially true for OS X and GTK+ 2 and it was
105therefore decided that OS X versions older than 10.4 Tiger and GTK+ 2
106version older than 2.4 are no longer supported. The wxWidgets team
107also realized that it could not do everything and that support for a
108cross-platform database API was beyond the scope and focus of the
109project so that its old wxODBC database connectivity classes were
110removed from the project. There are many cross-platform database
111libraries available and many of them are better than the old wxODBC
112and all of them are better maintained.</P>
113<H3 CLASS="western">Unicode: A Single Build for Everyone</H3>
114<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Until version 3.0 there
115have always been two different versions (or builds) of wxWidgets: one
116with full support for Unicode where each character was represented by
117a wchar_t internally (using two bytes under Windows and four bytes
118almost everywhere else) and another called the „ANSI“ build where
119each character was represented by a single byte. This model was
120chosen following the original Windows API model and at a point of
121time when Unicode support was hardly present anywhere else. In the
122meantime, the Windows world together with projects such as Java have
123chosen UTF-16 as the native representation for Unicode strings
124whereas much of the free software world including GTK+ and parts of
125Mac OS X have chosen UTF-8. It was therefore decided to drastically
126change the implementation of wxWidgets' string class and make it use
127UTF-16 under Windows (mostly as before) but UTF-8 elsewhere (instead
128of wide character strings using wchar_t) so that strings received
129from and sent to Unix and GTK+ library calls would no longer have to
130be converted back and forth between different Unicode representations
131(see <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_string.html">wxString</A>
132and <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/overview_unicode.html">Unicode
133overview</A>). Additionally, the „ANSI“ mode was removed and the
134wxString class as well as some other classes were modified to accept
135and return both Unicode and 8-bit string literals if required. The
136same was done to functions like wxPrintf() etc. Although this change
137will eventually not be seen by the end user of an application written
138using wxWidgets, it is such a fundamental change that it was the
139primary reason to give wxWidgets the new major version number 3.</P>
140<H3 CLASS="western">New 2D Drawing Code</H3>
141<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Although a 2D drawing API
142has always been part of wxWidgets (using so-called device contexts
143such as a window or a bitmap and pens and brushes to draw into them,
144see <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_d_c.html">wxDC</A>,
145<A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_pen.html">wxPen</A>,
146<A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_brush.html">wxBrush</A>),
147it has not changed much since its initial inception and so the code
148was completely reorganized using a single set of frontend classes and
149different backends which will make maintainance much easier without
150having to care for binary backwards compatibility and it also helped
151isolate a number of subtle platform differences. The old drawing API
152is good enough for many tasks and reflects the drawing capabilites of
153the 1990's but it didn't make use of advanced features such as
154transparency, anti-aliasing and free matrix transforms of modern 2D
155graphics systems such as GDI+ on Windows, Cairo on Linux (and
156elsewhere) and CoreGraphics on OS X. Therefore a completely new
157drawing API (the so called graphics contexts, see <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_graphics_context.html">wxGraphicsContext</A>)
158was added to wxWidgets making use of modern drawing engines. This is
159complemented by a bitmap class with alpha channel support and fast
160raw access to the bitmap's internal data representation. Additionally
161the API of all existing GDI class constants was corrected so that
162wxMODERN becomes wxFONTFAMILY_MODERN, wxSOLID becomes
163wxBRUSHSTYLE_SOLID etc. and the reference counting system was
164streamlined and made identical on all platforms.</P>
165<H3 CLASS="western">Changes to wxBase</H3>
166<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>wxBase is the name of the non-GUI part of wxWidgets
167libary which provides basic class such as the aforementioned wxString
168class, container classes, as well as classes for threading,
169networking, XML parsing, path and configuration management, logging,
170debugging etc. These functions and classes have been separated into
171their own library both for being able to write non-GUI apps as well
172as to make maintainance easier through reduced interdependence.
173</P>
174<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Many of the changes to wxString and the container
175classes are located in wxBase, but on top of that support to wxBase
176was added for events loops, timers and sockets for writing
177event-based client or server apps with wxWidgets 3.0. The socket code
178itself has been reorganized removing a lot of duplicated code and
179dropping the previous implementation which was separated into a C and
180a C++ part.</P>
181<H3 CLASS="western">New controls and other major GUI additions for
182all ports</H3>
183<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>This document cannot list every bug fix and minor
184change. Rather, this paragraph summarizes the most relevant changes
185to the GUI classes of wxWidgets. Given wxWidgets' nature as a GUI
186library, these changes are also most likely to be visible to the user
187and may thus be the most important changes from a user's perspective
188(although not necessarily from a developer's perspective):
189</P>
190<UL>
191 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>wxDataViewCtrl and wxDataViewTreeCtrl: this
192 control can partially replace both wxListCtrl and wxTreeCtrl (for
193 which there only was a native version of Windows and partially for
194 OS X) but also extends and combines the classes by being able to
195 display a hierarchy and list at the same time and by offering a much
196 more flexible way to display and edit data on a per column basis.
197 Reimplementing wxTreeCtrl and possibly wxListCtrl in terms of
198 wxDataViewCtrl was considered, but this was dropped as certain
199 special features are not available on all platforms (or
200 differently). See also <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_data_view_ctrl.html">wxDataViewCtrl</A>
201 and <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_data_view_tree_ctrl.html">wxDataViewTreeCtrl</A>.</P>
202 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>The tabular view of wxGrid has been improved
203 including a native header control, which has been separated into a
204 new control. See also <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_grid.html">wxGrid</A>
205 and <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_header_ctrl.html">wxHeaderCtrl.</A></P>
206 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added wxPropertyGrid which is a big generic
207 control used to display lists and hierarchies of name-value pairs.
208 Like wxDataViewCtrl, it offers a number of ready-to-use editors for
209 editing text, numbers, lists, fonts, file names etc. using in-place
210 editing or using pop-up dialog and combo boxes. Developement of
211 wxPropertyGrid has so far taken place outside of wxWidgets as a
212 separate project, but it has not been included in wxWidgets per se.
213 See also <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_property_grid.html">wxPropertyGrid</A>.</P>
214 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>wxHyperlinkCtrl added, implemented natively
215 under GTK+ and in a generic way on other platforms. It can be used
216 to represent a hypertext link, for example to the homepage of the
217 developer or company. See also <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_hyperlink_ctrl.html">wxHyperlinkCtrl</A>.</P>
218 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>wxFileCtrl for constructing fully customized
219 file dialogs. Complementary to this, the possibility to add custom
220 control to wxFileDialog has been added. See <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_file_ctrl.html">wxFileCtrl</A>
221 and <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_file_dialog.html">wxFileDialog</A>.</P>
222 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Several enhancements to wxRichTextCtrl
223 including support for super- and subscript and many speed-ups. See
224 <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_rich_text_ctrl.html">wxRichTextCtrl</A>.</P>
225 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>The possibility to display state icons has been
226 added to wxTreeCtrl. This can also be used to implement check-box
227 like behaviour. See <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_tree_ctrl.html">wxTreeCtrl</A>.</P>
228 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>wxCalendarCtrl has been rewritten using native
229 code under MSW and GTK+ and enhanced in many ways (for example
230 displaying week numbers). See <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_calendar_ctrl.html">wxCalendarCtrl</A>.</P>
231 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Implemented support for auto-completion for
232 wxTextCtrl and wxComboBox.</P>
233 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added wxAUIToolBar to the set of wxAUI classes,
234 which is better integrated and more flexible than the standard
235 wxToolBar.</P>
236 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Reimplemented wxBitmapComboBox using native
237 code under MSW and GTK+. See also <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_bitmap_combo_box.html">wxBitmapComboBox</A>.</P>
238 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added wxBitmapToggleButton on all platforms.
239 See also <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_bitmap_toggle_button.html">wxBitmapToggleButton</A>.</P>
240 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added support for ellipsization on all
241 platforms and for mark-up formatting under GTK+ to wxStaticText. See
242 <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_static_text.html">wxStaticText</A>.</P>
243 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Rewritten the selection event emission logic of
244 wxListBox on all platforms to more exactly match each other when
245 selecting and deselecting certain items.</P>
246 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Implemented wxCollapsiblePane natively for GTK
247 and OS X. See <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_collapsible_pane.html">wxCollapsiblePane</A>.</P>
248 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added a new sizer which can wrap across
249 multiple lines. See <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_wrap_sizer.html">wxWrapSizer</A>.</P>
250 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added multi-sample and anti-aliasing support
251 the the OpenGl canvas and separated wxGLCanvas and wxGLContext. See
252 <A HREF="http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_g_l_canvas.html">wxGLCanvas</A>.</P>
253 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Added wxNativeContainerWindow in order to
254 construct a wxTopLevelWindow from a native window handle (MSW and
255 GTK+).</P>
256</UL>
257<H3 CLASS="western">wxMac specific changes (now called wxOSX)</H3>
258<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>One important change of the wxMac port is that the
259port is not called wxMac anymore. Instead, the more appropriate term
260wxOSX should be used as the operating system is called OS X nowadays
261and – more importantly – wxWidgets now has partial support for
262iPhone and iPod, and these are devices are clearly not Macs. Apart
263from the name change – wxMac has undergone the most fundamental
264changes of the three main ports, even if some of the changes were
265mostly reorganizing code instead of writing new code. The code has
266been reorganized into common code (common to Carbon, Cocoa and Cocoa
267Touch) including both general wrapping or front-end classes for much
268of the GUI code as well as a wrapper for the so called CoreFoundation
269classes of OS X, which are responsible on all OS X variants for
270string manipulation, font support, graphics and other basic
271functionality (CoreImage and CoreVideo have recently been added by
272Apple) and toolkit dependent code for the Carbon, Cocoa and Cocoa
273Touch API. The Carbon variant is the core of what used to be wxMac
274and is the most stable and mature version. The reason behind adding
275optional support for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch is that Carbon is not
276available on iPhones at all and that it has been deprecated for all
27764-bit versions of OS X, which is likely to be the default a few
278years from now. So while present applications using wxOSX are advised
279to use the Carbon backend due its maturity, future developement will
280have to focus on the Cocoa backend.</P>
281<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>As part of the restructuring, all remaining drawing
282code using the old QuickDraw API has been removed (it was only an
283option before) and drawing now always takes place using CoreGraphics.
284Likewise, all code using Carbon functions no longer present in OS X
28510.4 has been removed to clean-up the code greatly. This is turn
286means, as mentioned above, that applications will require a minimum
287of OS X 10.4 in order to run, better yet OS X 10.5.</P>
288<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Apart from these large changes, these additional
289features can be noted:</P>
290<UL>
291 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Better support for IconRef</P>
292 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>A fix for duplicate menu entries in non-English
293 locales</P>
294 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>Accelerators allowed to be used for buttons</P>
295 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY>wxLocale::GetInfo() implemented using CFLocale</P>
296</UL>
297<H3 CLASS="western">wxGTK specific changes</H3>
298<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">The task of the GTK+ port
299of wxWidgets is to keep up with the development of the GTK+ library
300since it has the habit of adding new controls or new APIs if the
301existing code is too limited and cannot be fixed in a backward
302compatible way. The main problem of this approach is that
303applications written using wxGTK shoud work with relatively old
304versions of GTK+ but should also make use of recent features. In some
305cases, supporting an old version of GTK+ hinders development so we
306decided to declare GTK+ 2.4 the minimum toolkit version that is
307supported. As an example, this made it possible to always use the
308GTK+ file dialog instead of the old generic file dialog which had to
309be used when GTK+ didn't have a usable file dialog.
310</P>
311<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Other parts of wxGTK that
312were rewritten or which underwent a major update include, but are not
313limited to:</P>
314<UL>
315 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">wxToolbar now uses
316 the „new“ GTK+ toolbar API</P>
317 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">wxChoice now uses
318 GtkComboBox instead of the deprecated GtkOptionMenu</P>
319 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">wxComboBox now
320 always uses GtkComboBox instead of the deprecated GtkCombo class</P>
321 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">URL dragging using
322 the „text/x-moz-url“ in wxURLDataObject</P>
323 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Added a completely
324 new printing backend using with dialogs GtkPrint and Cairo</P>
325 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Rewritten idle event
326 generation code</P>
327 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Tab traversal is now
328 done natively by GTK+ instead of by wxWidgets</P>
329 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Rewrote layout of
330 wxFrame's menubar, toolbar, client window and statusbar using a
331 GtkVBox instead of our own calculation</P>
332 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Correctly
333 implemented SetSize() and GetSize() for toplevel windows in spite of
334 the dreaded problems with window decorations belonging to the Window
335 Manager and not the window itself</P>
336 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Added an
337 asynchronous API to wxClipboard to avoid having to call wxYield()
338 from within it (which causes reentrance problems).</P>
339 <LI><P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Some support for
340 Hildon control from the Maemo platform used for Nokia tablets</P>
341</UL>
342<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm"><BR>
343</P>
344<H3 CLASS="western">wxMSW specific changes</H3>
345<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">wxMSW is the most mature platform,
346mostly because it is used most often and thus has the biggest user,
347tester and developer base, but also because the underlying Windows
348system has been more successful at preserving backwards
349compatibility. Therefore, the list of wxMSW-specific changes is
350smaller and the changes usually minor details when compared to the
351changes of the other two main ports:</P>
352<UL>
353 <LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Implemented more native looking
354 wxCheckListBox and add ability to store client data in it</P>
355 <LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Allow longer tooltips</P>
356 <LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Support for multiline labels in
357 wxCheckBox and wxToggleButton</P>
358 <LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">More precise print preview</P>
359 <LI><P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">Show resize gripper in resizable
360 dialogs</P>
361</UL>
362<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm"><BR>
363</P>
364<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm"><BR>
365</P>
366<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm"><BR>
367</P>
368</BODY>
369</HTML>