Has anyone used wxWidgets before? What's the overhead like (as in, are wxWdigets apps sluggish? How easy is it to use?

More importantly, is anyone porting it to Amiga OS? Or considering doing so? My interest is because it's the only cross-platform GUI toolkit that I know of that uses native gadgets. I'm also lazy so it would be great if I could use one GUI toolkit for all target OSes instead of having to write separate GUIs.

AFAIK, intuition's structure is fairly different to that of other OSes (i.e., the GUI system has its own thread so that redrawing doesn't require interaction with the main app). I'd be interested to hear people's opinions on whether that would cause any difficulty with such a port.

Hans

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@Hans,

I gained a lot of experience with wxWidgets while porting Audio Evolution from OS4 to it. It's a lot easier to use than anything available on AmigaOS and easier than MFC on Windows. In the early stages of porting, the same code ran under Windows and under the OS4 X11 server. I chose this toolkit above others because it uses the native gadgets and it is free for commercial use. I haven't experienced any sluggish-ness on Windows.
Some very early screenshot on OS4/X11 of AE5:
http://www.audio-evolution.com/pics/ae5x11.png
and on Windows (much much later!):
http://www.audio-evolution.com/pics/AE5vst.png

You can use wxWidgets under OS4/X11, but it had some shortcomings (at least at the time I tried it).

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@Hans

Quote:

is anyone porting it to Amiga OS? Or considering doing so?

An interest for a bounty was expressed in this thread. But nothing has been heard since then

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@DaveAE

Thanks for the info. I'll definitely have a look at it. It's just a pity that I can't use it on the Amiga.

@Fransexy

Quote:

Fransexy wrote: @Hans Quote: is anyone porting it to Amiga OS? Or considering doing so? An interest for a bounty was expressed in this thread. But nothing has been heard since then

Now that's a bounty that I'd definitely donate to. I don't care if it uses Reaction or MUI underneath, so long as it works well. Personally, I suck at porting things, and this one is definitely not a "change compiler flags and recompile" job. Wrapper classes have to be created that map wxWidgets to Reaction/MUI classes, and drawing context classes also need to be created so that custom wxWidgets become custom Reaction/MUI widgets.

Hans

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@Hans

There is much more than just wrapper to Reaction to write : wxWidgets is whole abstraction to a lot of things provided by the host OS. Once in the time Yomgui (MOS Blender porter for one thing) and me started to look at that and even begun to implement an OS3/OS4/MOS compatible port, but unfortunately we both ran out of time and given the fact that there was almost no interest feedback in the thing we did not resumed our sf.net project yet.
If anyone is interested I can provide help on the part we already wrote to compile on OS4 version (Yomgui was taking care of the MOS version).

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@Hans

Quote:

it's the only cross-platform GUI toolkit that I know of that uses native gadgets

Huh? Fltk?

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@abalaban

How far did you get with the port? I'm definitely interested. While I can't help with porting it, I should be able to test it.

Hans

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@jack

Quote:

jack wrote: @Hans Quote: it's the only cross-platform GUI toolkit that I know of that uses native gadgets Huh? Fltk?

AFAIK FLTK does not use native gadgets, but draws its own. So applications written with FLTK won't look like native applications unless a native theme is written for FLTK. One thing that annoys me with GTK based programs on windows is that the file-requesters, for example, aren't the windows ones (they're worse).

Hans

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@Hans

If you like wxWidgets, you will love this:

wx-DevC++

BTW AmiDevCpp is Wx-DevC++ with Crosscompilers.

For Windows Apps I can recommend wxWidgets.
The Programs work just fine and the Development is comfortable.

Last edited by Heinz on 13-Dec-2007 at 07:41 PM.

@Hans

Quote:

AFAIK FLTK does not use native gadgets, but draws its own

You're right, It does use native window, but classes are entirely it's own.
Apologies.
Jack

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@Heinz

Are their any cross-platform GUI design tools? wx-DevC++ is windows only. I'll really have to have a closer look at wxWidgets now.

Hans

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@abalaban

I was looking through some of the source-code for the windows version and noticed JPEG, PNG and TIFF loading code. Could we ditch those in favour of using the picture datatype? It's always a little annoying with quick and dirty ports that they contain image decoders/encoders that the system already has. We don't need libpng, libjpeg, etc.

Hans

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@Hans

The port was very far from that point of achievement. But using datatype might have been envisaged depending on the modularity of the code on that specific part...

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@all

the code is on the sourceforge projet named wxWidget-aos everyone is welcome to look at it I can even give help for the AOS4 part if needed. For now I don't have plan to resume it myself...

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@abalaban

Quote:

abalaban wrote: @Hans The port was very far from that point of achievement. But using datatype might have been envisaged depending on the modularity of the code on that specific part...

It would help if you gave a basic idea on how to build the thing. I see OS4 makefiles there, but I have no idea where the base makefile is, or whether I should do a ./configure.

Hans

EDIT: Just got the PM, so it's a simple make. Great, because I don't like automake/autoconf.,

Last edited by Hans on 13-Dec-2007 at 09:59 PM.

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@All

makefiles are in src/amiga/

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@abalaban

Ok, I needed to make a few changes in order to work with the current SDK, but it compiles. The file test in the console sample app fails at present, but its a start.

@all
So, is there any interest in resurrecting this project? I kind of need it as the only way that I can justify spending a lot of time on Amiga coding would be if I could port it to other platforms quickly. WxWidgets allows the GUI components to still be native, but be cross-platform too. It also includes networking etc., so that's a lot of code that wouldn't have to be duplicated in cross-platform work (although almost every system uses BSD style sockets so that's no biggie).

Seeing as the wxWidgets-aos was going to be for all Amiga like OSes, maybe some of the AROS & MOS guys would be interested in this one too.

Hans

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@Hans

YES! VERY INTERESTED! PLEASE GO ON!

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@spotUP

Quote:

spotUP wrote: @Hans YES! VERY INTERESTED! PLEASE GO ON!

Um, I'm not going to port it personally. I can certainly help, but I need others that are more experienced with this kind of stuff to do most of the work. I suck at porting, and my GUI programming knowledge is rather limited at the moment.

Hans

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@Hans

The way we started it with Yomgui can't be called a 'port' in the way we used to see other ports (i.e. a simple ./configure --host=ppc-amigaos --prefix=/SDK/local/clib2 --includedir=/SDK/local/common/include && make). In fact wxWidget is very well designed to be multiplatform so all one have to do is implementing basic APIs using the host OS then thoses APIs are called by upper code that you won't have to touch...

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Thank you to all devs involved for this great job !