wxWindows is a C++ framework providing GUI (Graphical User
Interface) and other facilities on more than one platform. Version 2.0 currently
-supports subsets MS Windows (16-bit, Windows 95 and Windows NT) and GTK+, with Motif
-and Mac ports in an advanced state.
+supports MS Windows (16-bit, Windows 95 and Windows NT), Unix with GTK+, and Unix with Motif.
+A Mac port is in an advanced state, an OS/2 port and a port to the MGL graphics library
+have been started.
wxWindows was originally developed at the Artificial Intelligence
Applications Institute, University of Edinburgh, for internal use.
wxWindows has been released into the public domain in the hope
that others will also find it useful. Version 2.0 is written and
-maintained by Julian Smart, Robert Roebling and others.
+maintained by Julian Smart, Robert Roebling, Vadim Zeitlin and others.
This manual discusses wxWindows in the context of multi-platform
development.\helpignore{For more detail on the wxWindows version 2.0 API
wxWindows was developed to provide a cheap and flexible way to maximize
investment in GUI application development. While a number of commercial
-class libraries already exist for cross-platform development,
+class libraries already existed for cross-platform development,
none met all of the following criteria:
\begin{enumerate}\itemsep=0pt
\item support for a wide range of compilers.
\end{enumerate}
+Since wxWindows was started, several other free or almost-free GUI frameworks have
+emerged. However, none has the range of features, flexibility, documentation and the
+well-established development team that wxWindows has.
+
As public domain software and a project open to everyone, wxWindows has
benefited from comments, ideas, bug fixes, enhancements and the sheer
enthusiasm of users, especially via the Internet. This gives wxWindows a
-certain advantage over its commercial brothers, and a robustness against
+certain advantage over its commercial competitors (and over free libraries
+without an independent development team), plus a robustness against
the transience of one individual or company. This openness and
availability of source code is especially important when the future of
thousands of lines of application code may depend upon the longevity of
the underlying class library.
-In writing wxWindows, completeness has sometimes been traded for
-portability and simplicity of programming. Version 2.0 goes much
-further than previous versions in terms of generality and features,
+Version 2.0 goes much further than previous versions in terms of generality and features,
allowing applications to be produced
that are often indistinguishable from those produced using single-platform
-toolkits
-such as Motif and MFC.
+toolkits such as Motif and MFC.
The importance of using a platform-independent class library cannot be
overstated, since GUI application development is very time-consuming,
Code can very quickly become obsolete if it addresses the wrong
platform or audience. wxWindows helps to insulate the programmer from
these winds of change. Although wxWindows may not be suitable for
-every application, it provides access to most of the functionality a
-GUI program normally requires, plus some extras such as form
-construction, interprocess communication and PostScript output, and
-can of course be extended as needs dictate. As a bonus, it provides
+every application (such as an OLE-intensive program), it provides access to most of the functionality a
+GUI program normally requires, plus some extras such as network programming
+and PostScript output, and can of course be extended as needs dictate. As a bonus, it provides
a cleaner programming interface than the native
APIs. Programmers may find it worthwhile to use wxWindows even if they
are developing on only one platform.
\begin{itemize}\itemsep=0pt
\item Low cost (free, in fact!)
\item You get the source.
-\item Several example programs.
-\item Over 700 pages of printable and on-line documentation.
+\item Available on a variety of popular platforms.
+\item Works with almost all popular C++ compilers and Python.
+\item Over 40 example programs.
+\item Over 900 pages of printable and on-line documentation.
+\item Includes Tex2RTF, to allow you to produce your own documentation
+in Windows Help, HTML and Word RTF formats.
\item Simple-to-use, object-oriented API.
-\item Graphics calls include splines, polylines, rounded rectangles, etc.
-\item Constraint-based layout option.
+\item Flexible event system.
+\item Graphics calls include lines, rounded rectangles, splines, polylines, etc.
+\item Constraint-based and sizer-based layouting.
\item Print/preview and document/view architectures.
-\item Status line facility, toolbar
-\item Encapsulated PostScript generation under Unix, normal MS Windows printing on the
-PC.
+\item Toolbar, notebook, tree control, advanced list control classes.
+\item PostScript generation under Unix, normal MS Windows printing on the PC.
\item MDI (Multiple Document Interface) support.
\item Can be used to create DLLs under Windows, dynamic libraries on Unix.
\item Common dialogs for file browsing, printing, colour selection, etc.
\item Under MS Windows, support for creating metafiles and copying
them to the clipboard.
\item An API for invoking help from applications.
+\item Ready to use HTML window (supporting a subset of HTML).
\item Dialog Editor for building dialogs.
-\item Socket support.
+\item Network support via a family of socket and protocol classes.
+\item Support for platform independent image procesing.
+\item Built-in support for many file formats (BMP, PNG, JPEG, GIF, XPM, PNM, PCX).
\end{itemize}
\section{Changes from version 1.xx}\label{versionchanges}
temporarily with the window as an argument;
\item events from sliders and scrollbars can be handled more flexibly;
\item the handling of window close events has been changed in line with the new
-event system, but backward {\bf OnClose} compatibility has been retained;
+event system;
\item the concept of {\it validator} has been added to allow much easier coding of
the relationship between controls and application data;
\item the documentation has been revised, with more cross-referencing.
\item MDI classes brought out of wxFrame into separate classes, and made more flexible.
\end{itemize}
+
+\section{Changes from version 2.0}\label{versionchanges20}
+
+These are a few of the differences between versions 2.0 and 2.2.
+
+Removals:
+
+\begin{itemize}\itemsep=0pt
+\item GTK 1.0 no longer supported.
+\end{itemize}
+
+Additions and changes:
+
+\begin{itemize}\itemsep=0pt
+\item Corrected many classes to conform better to documented behaviour.
+\item Added handlers for more image formats (Now GIF, JPEG, PCX, BMP, XPM, PNG, PNM).
+\item Improved support for socket and network functions.
+\item Support for different national font encodings.
+\item Sizer based layout system.
+\item HTML widget and help system.
+\item Added some controls (e.g. wxSpinCtrl) and supplemented many.
+\item Many optical improvements to GTK port.
+\item Support for menu accelerators in GTK port.
+\item Enhanced and improved support for scrolling, including child windows.
+\item Complete rewrite of clipboard and drag'n'drop classes.
+\item Improved support for ODBC databases.
+\item Improved tab traversal in dialogs.
+\end{itemize}
+
+
\section{wxWindows requirements}\label{requirements}
To make use of wxWindows, you currently need one or both of the
\begin{enumerate}\itemsep=0pt
\item A 486 or higher PC running MS Windows.
-\item One of Microsoft Visual C++ 4.0 or higher, Borland C++, Gnu-Win32.
+\item A Windows compiler: most are supported, but please see {\tt install.txt} for
+details. Supported compilers include Microsoft Visual C++ 4.0 or higher, Borland C++, Cygwin,
+Metrowerks CodeWarrior.
\item At least 60 MB of disk space.
\end{enumerate}
(b) Unix:
\begin{enumerate}\itemsep=0pt
-\item Almost any C++ compiler, including GNU C++.
-\item Almost any Unix workstation, and one of: GTK+ 1.0, Motif 1.2 or higher, Lesstif.
+\item Almost any C++ compiler, including GNU C++ (EGCS 1.1.1 or above).
+\item Almost any Unix workstation, and one of: GTK+ 1.2, Motif 1.2 or higher, Lesstif.
\item At least 60 MB of disk space.
\end{enumerate}
\section{Availability and location of wxWindows}
-wxWindows is currently available from the Artificial Intelligence
-Applications Institute by anonymous FTP and World Wide Web:
+wxWindows is available by anonymous FTP and World Wide Web
+from \urlref{ftp://www.remstar.com/pub/wxwin}{ftp://www.remstar.com/pub/wxwin}
+and/or \urlref{http://www.wxwindows.org}{http://www.wxwindows.org}
-\begin{verbatim}
- ftp://www.remstar.com/pub/wxwin
- http://wxwin.home.ml.org
-\end{verbatim}
+You can also buy a CD-ROM using the form on the Web site, or by contacting:
+
+Julian Smart\\
+12 North Street West\\
+Uppingham\\
+Rutland\\
+LE15 9SG\\
+julian.smart@ukonline.co.uk
\section{Acknowledgments}
Yiorgos Adamopoulos, Jamshid Afshar, Alejandro Aguilar-Sierra, AIAI, Patrick Albert, Karsten Ballueder, Michael Bedward, Kai Bendorf, Yura Bidus, Keith
Gary Boyce, Chris Breeze, Pete Britton, Ian Brown, C. Buckley, Dmitri Chubraev, Robin Corbet, Cecil Coupe, Andrew Davison, Neil Dudman, Robin
Dunn, Hermann Dunkel, Jos van Eijndhoven, Tom Felici, Thomas Fettig, Matthew Flatt, Pasquale Foggia, Josep Fortiana, Todd Fries, Dominic Gallagher,
-Wolfram Gloger, Norbert Grotz, Stefan Gunter, Bill Hale, Patrick Halke, Stefan Hammes, Guillaume Helle, Harco de Hilster, Cord Hockemeyer, Markus
+Guillermo Rodriguez Garcia, Wolfram Gloger, Norbert Grotz, Stefan Gunter, Bill Hale, Patrick Halke, Stefan Hammes, Guillaume Helle, Harco de Hilster, Cord Hockemeyer, Markus
Holzem, Olaf Klein, Leif Jensen, Bart Jourquin, Guilhem Lavaux, Jan Lessner, Nicholas Liebmann, Torsten Liermann, Per Lindqvist, Thomas Runge, Tatu
-M\"{a}nnist\"{o}, Scott Maxwell, Thomas Myers, Oliver Niedung, Hernan Otero, Ian Perrigo, Timothy Peters, Giordano Pezzoli, Harri Pasanen, Thomaso Paoletti,
-Garrett Potts, Marcel Rasche, Robert Roebling, Dino Scaringella, Jobst Schmalenbach, Arthur Seaton, Paul Shirley, Stein Somers, Petr Smilauer, Neil Smith,
-Kari Syst\"{a}, Arthur Tetzlaff-Deas, Jonathan Tonberg, Jyrki Tuomi, Janos Vegh, Andrea Venturoli, Vadim Zeitlin, Xiaokun Zhu, Edward Zimmermann.
+M\"{a}nnist\"{o}, Scott Maxwell, Thomas Myers, Oliver Niedung, Stefan Neis, Hernan Otero, Ian Perrigo, Timothy Peters, Giordano Pezzoli, Harri Pasanen, Thomaso Paoletti,
+Garrett Potts, Marcel Rasche, Robert Roebling, Dino Scaringella, Jobst Schmalenbach, Arthur Seaton, Paul Shirley, Vaclav Slavik, Stein Somers, Petr Smilauer, Neil Smith,
+Kari Syst\"{a}, Arthur Tetzlaff-Deas, Jonathan Tonberg, Jyrki Tuomi, David Webster, Janos Vegh, Andrea Venturoli, Vadim Zeitlin, Xiaokun Zhu, Edward Zimmermann.
`Graphplace', the basis for the wxGraphLayout library, is copyright Dr. Jos
T.J. van Eijndhoven of Eindhoven University of Technology. The code has
\section{Libraries}
-Please the wxGTK or wxMotif documentation for use of the Unix version of wxWindows.
+The GTK and Motif ports of wxWindow can create either a static library or a shared
+library on most Unix or Unix-like systems. The static library is called libwx\_gtk.a
+and libwx\_motif.a whereas the name of the shared library is dependent on the
+system it is created on and the version you are using. The library name for the
+GTK version of wxWindows 2.2 on Linux and Solaris will be libwx\_gtk-2.2.so.0.0.0,
+on HP-UX, it will be libwx\_gtk-2.2.sl, on AIX just libwx\_gtk.a etc.
+
Under Windows, use the library wx.lib for stand-alone Windows
applications, or wxdll.lib for creating DLLs.
\section{Configuration}
Options are configurable in the file
-\rtfsp{\tt "wx/XXX/setup.h"} where XXX is the required platform (such as msw, motif, gtk, mac). Some settings are a matter
-of taste, some help with platform-specific problems, and
+\rtfsp{\tt "wx/XXX/setup.h"} where XXX is the required platform (such as msw, motif, gtk, mac). Some
+settings are a matter of taste, some help with platform-specific problems, and
others can be set to minimize the size of the library. Please see the setup.h file
and {\tt install.txt} files for details on configuration.
+Under Unix (GTK and Motif) the corresponding setup.h files are generated automatically
+when configuring the wxWindows using the "configure" script. When using the RPM packages
+for installing wxWindows on Linux, a correct setup.h is shipped in the package and
+this must not be changed.
+
\section{Makefiles}
At the moment there is no attempt to make Unix makefiles and
PC makefiles compatible, i.e. one makefile is required for
-each environment. wxGTK has its own configure system which can also
-be used with wxMotif, although wxMotif has a simple makefile system of its own.
-
-Sample makefiles for Unix (suffix .UNX), MS C++ (suffix .DOS and .NT), Borland
+each environment. The Unix ports use a sophisticated system based
+on the GNU autoconf tool and this system will create the
+makefiles as required on the respective platform. Although the
+makefiles are not identical in Windows, Mac and Unix, care has
+been taken to make them relatively similar so that moving from
+one platform to another will be painless.
+
+Sample makefiles for Unix (suffix .unx), MS C++ (suffix .DOS and .NT), Borland
C++ (.BCC and .B32) and Symantec C++ (.SC) are included for the library, demos
and utilities.
-The controlling makefile for wxWindows is in the platform-specific
-directory, such as {\tt src/msw} or {\tt src/motif}.
+The controlling makefile for wxWindows is in the MS-Windows
+directory {\tt src/msw} for the different Windows compiler and
+in the build directory when using the Unix ports. The build
+directory can be chosen by the user. It is the directory in
+which the "configure" script is run. This can be the normal
+base directory (by running {\tt ./configure} there) or any other
+directory (e.g. {\tt ../configure} after creating a build-directory
+in the directory level above the base directory).
Please see the platform-specific {\tt install.txt} file for further details.
The only lines which will usually have to be changed per application are
NAME and DESCRIPTION.
-\subsection{Allocating and deleting wxWindows objects}
+\section{Allocating and deleting wxWindows objects}
In general, classes derived from wxWindow must dynamically allocated
with {\it new} and deleted with {\it delete}. If you delete a window,
a drawing object that may be in use. Code that doesn't do this will probably work
fine on some platforms, and then fail under Windows.
+\section{Architecture dependency}
+
+A problem which sometimes arises from writing multi-platform programs is that
+the basic C types are not defiend the same on all platforms. This holds true
+for both the length in bits of the standard types (such as int and long) as
+well as their byte order, which might be little endian (typically
+on Intel computers) or big endian (typically on some Unix workstations). wxWindows
+defines types and macros that make it easy to write architecture independent
+code. The types are:
+
+wxInt32, wxInt16, wxInt8, wxUint32, wxUint16 = wxWord, wxUint8 = wxByte
+
+where wxInt32 stands for a 32-bit signed integer type etc. You can also check
+which architecture the program is compiled on using the wxBYTE\_ORDER define
+which is either wxBIG\_ENDIAN or wxLITTLE\_ENDIAN (in the future maybe wxPDP\_ENDIAN
+as well).
+
+The macros handling bit-swapping with respect to the applications endianness
+are described in the \helpref{Macros}{macros} section.
+
\section{Conditional compilation}
One of the purposes of wxWindows is to reduce the need for conditional
wxWindows does not use templates since it is a notoriously unportable feature.
+\subsection{RTTI}
+
+wxWindows does not use run-time type information since wxWindows provides
+its own run-time type information system, implemented using macros.
+
+\subsection{Type of NULL}
+
+Some compilers (e.g. the native IRIX cc) define NULL to be 0L so that
+no conversion to pointers is allowed. Because of that, all these
+occurences of NULL in the GTK port use an explicit conversion such
+as
+
+{\small
+\begin{verbatim}
+ wxWindow *my_window = (wxWindow*) NULL;
+\end{verbatim}
+}
+
+It is recommended to adhere to this in all code using wxWindows as
+this make the code (a bit) more portable.
+
\subsection{Precompiled headers}
Some compilers, such as Borland C++ and Microsoft C++, support
precompiled headers. This can save a great deal of compiling time. The
-recommended approach is to precompile {\tt ``wx.h''}, using this
+recommended approach is to precompile {\tt "wx.h"}, using this
precompiled header for compiling both wxWindows itself and any
wxWindows applications. For Windows compilers, two dummy source files
are provided (one for normal applications and one for creating DLLs)
is that to take advantage of the facility, you often need to include
more header files than would normally be the case. This means that
changing a header file will cause more recompilations (in the case of
-wxWindows, everything needs to be recompiled since everything includes
-{\tt ``wx.h''}!)
+wxWindows, everything needs to be recompiled since everything includes {\tt "wx.h"}!)
A related problem is that for compilers that don't have precompiled
headers, including a lot of header files slows down compilation
A number of `extras' are supplied with wxWindows, to complement
the GUI functionality in the main class library. These are found
below the utils directory and usually have their own source, library
-and documentation directories. For larger user-contributed packages,
-see the directory /pub/packages/wxwin/contrib.
+and documentation directories. For other user-contributed packages,
+see the directory ftp://www.remstar.com/pub/wxwin/contrib, which is
+more easily accessed via the Contributions page on the Web site.
\section{wxHelp}\label{wxhelp}
Don't use absolute panel item positioning if you can avoid it. Different GUIs have
very differently sized panel items. Consider using the constraint system, although this
-can be complex to program. If you needs are simple, the default relative positioning
-behaviour may be adequate (using default position values and wxPanel::NewLine).
+can be complex to program.
Alternatively, you could use alternative .wrc (wxWindows resource files) on different
platforms, with slightly different dimensions in each. Or space your panel items out
\subsection{Check Windows debug messages}
-Under Windows, it's worth running your program with DBWIN running or
+Under Windows, it's worth running your program with
+\urlref{DbgView}{http://www.sysinternals.com} running or
some other program that shows Windows-generated debug messages. It's
possible it'll show invalid handles being used. You may have fun seeing
what commercial programs cause these normally hidden errors! Microsoft
projects / wxWidgets.git / blobdiff