Design question for a cross platform GUI (FLTK)
- Posted by Ray Smith <smithr at ix.net.au> Oct 14, 2001
- 561 views
Hi, I have been playing around with a cross platform GUI called Fast Light Tool Kit ("FLTK") at http://www.fltk.org/. I have a few simple things working (in Windows) and it looks great! It is not as extensive as Win32Lib but is much smaller (and so far simpler). One drawback is that it uses it's own widget set (like gtk). It also doesn't have the rich set of widgets available like wxWindows. I guess this is the trade off for being small and simple! I have to make a decision as to how I will expose the classes and methods of FLTK. It has a rather different design than that of Windows (i.e. Win32Lib) and I have the option of trying to manipulate my FLTK wrapper to look a bit like Windows (ie Win32Lib) or do a straight wrapper to FLTK as FLTK works. For example ... Radio buttons. In FLTK a radio button is just a "Round" command button with the RADIO attribute set. I could force my wrapper for the "Round" command button to set the RADIO attribute to make it look like windows ... or I could leave it as FLTK does and let the programmer decide how they want to use it. At this stage I'm leaning towards the "leave it as FLTK" does it method as it is the most flexible and powerful. The down side is that this method is also the most "foreign" to current Windows and Win32Lib programmers. Just as a side note I have wrapped an "ASK" dialog box class that asks a yes/no question with some text ... I have this bug where "YES" is the only button that is displayed ... and it sort of reminded me of one of the questions in the Euphoria survey!!!! (Which I will have to tabulate one day!) I feel pretty bad about not completing that (IF anyone wants a really boring job I'm willing to send them all the results to be tabulated!!! Any takers??? anyway ... back to my question ... does anyone have any comments either way on the "best" way to wrap FLTK? Anyone have any other questions about FLTK? Ray Smith http;//www.geocities.com/ray_223