wt - a, SDL Based, C++ widget toolkit

License

The library is licensed under the LGPL (see COPYING.LIB). The configure scripts are GPL, except otherwise stated (see COPYING for the GPL)

Download

This project is hosted in sourceforge.

History

The libwt is based on the library 'libwftk' known as the Worldforge toolkit. which was based on the library 'libuta', by Karsten O. Laux.  libwftk began as a fork of libuta 0.4.4.

libwt contains almost no code from the original libwftk, with region.* being the exception.

See AUTHORS for the people involved.

Depends

libwt depends on the following libraries:
In a future version we will offer smpeg or ffmpeg wrappers for multimedia playback

Note that smpeg is not available on modern (8.0 and later) versions of Red Hat Linux.

If the SDL_mixer library is present, wt uses it for sound and music playback. SDL_mixer's site is http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_mixer/ MP3 and OGG support are available through SDL_mixer.

Rationale & Features

It all began when I was looking for a SDL toolkit. There were lots of them. The main problem for me was that there was no layout manager.  The only toolkits that had one, were libwftk and Agar. Agar is C based and I am not so hot about doing widgets in C, so I turned to libwftk.

libwftk was ok. It had a reasonable API but it had also a fatal problem. It was extremely slow. The reason of the perceived slowness was excessive redrawing. libwftk didn't optimize redraws in order to avoid redundant repaints. Actually in order to do that a fully asynchronous event system was required.

So I implemented one, and a layout manager and a Qt like API to bind all this together. Why a Qt API you may ask? Well, for starters Qt has a really nice API, very close to the libwftk one, so it was not big departure for me. Secondly, I already have a hands on experience with the Qt API and I find it coherent and internally consistent.

So libwt offers the following features:
signal and slots made right (in the C++ way via libsigc++-2.0)

Future

Future work should be around the following areas:

Build

libwt demos and tests are in the subdirectory 'tests' and are not built by default - to build them, run 'make tests'.

Documentation comes in two flavors. User guide is built with doxygen if it exists if you run 'make doc' in toplevel directory. However if you want programmer's guide you need to 'cd doc; make pguide'. The resulting subdirectories are doc/uguide and doc/pguide respectively.

Online Documentation

The documentation is generated by doxygen and we haven't document a lot of things yet.

Enjoy!

Vassilis Virvilis <vasvir2@fastmail.fm>