Programs Using Wxwidgets Tutorial
Use the Developer Command Environment and rebuild wxWidgets from the source. Your platform (32-bit/64-bit) must match the wxWidgets libraries in order for you to use them. A lot less headaches to build wxWidgets to suite your development environment. – Thomas Matthews Jun 23 '16 at 15:06. Under wxWidgets main is implemented using this macro, which creates an application instance and starts the program. WxIMPLEMENTAPP (MyApp) As mentioned above, wxApp::OnInit is called upon startup and should be used to initialize the program, maybe showing a 'splash screen' and creating the main window (or several).
Contents.Reference material. The provides a powerful engine for searching though various official wxWidgets resources. The holds much valuable information. Especially the full is invaluable. The most important sections are:. The is something most developers will want to have handy at all times while programming with wxWidgets.
The same goes for the page. The are very good articles on specific features/concepts. You can quickly access the documentation from your browser using.
This Wiki itself provides documentation, tips, pitfalls, warnings and plenty of links to relevant sections in the official documentation.
About wxWidgets is a C library that provides an API for writing multi-platform programs. While the main focus is on graphical user interface development using classes such as wxWindow, wxWidgets also provides classes for file, thread, and database access among others.
The three main branches of wxWidgets are wxGTK (UNIX), wxMSW (Windows), and wxMac (Mac OS). Other branches such as X11, OS/2, and embedded platforms are available but are not as mature or widespread.
Programs written with wxWidgets are able to be recompiled for each supported platform with no changes to the source code. Programs written using wxWidgets may be licensed under the GPL or the library may be dual licensed using the LGPL. This means that a closed source program using wxWidgets is possible - the wxWidgets library is then under the LGPL, with the closed source part under whatever license the author chooses. Obtaining The wxWidgets library is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is available at the website. The library is distributed in source code form.
There is a download available for each of the major supported branches, or the source code for all platforms may be downloaded in one archive. Choose the download that is appropriate for your situation. However, if you plan on using the library to develop on multiple platforms then the “All ports combined” archive is ideal.
In this guide, the wxGTK-2.6.2.tar.bz2 archive was used. Compiling As this guide is hosted on a Linux Wiki, the remaining details will be focused on Linux. Provided that the development environment is set up properly on Windows and Mac OS the rest of this guide will apply. See the Tips section on working with wxWidgets on other platforms.
Extract the archive downloaded, either the single port or the archive of all ports. For end users, it is enough to use the classic./configure && make && make install method of compiling and installing the library. However, developers typically require a variety of libraries with different configurations. For example, it is a good idea to have debug, standard, and optimized versions of the library on hand. In the case of wxWidgets, it is also good to have custom static versions for particular applications containing the features desired such as ODBC connectivity and SDL support. For an explanation of static verses shared builds and other build options see the Tips section. The following demonstrates how to compile a build of the library while keeping the source tree clean for other builds.
This build will be a static release build. Configured wxWidgets 2.6.2 for i686-pc-linux-gnu Which GUI toolkit should wxWidgets use? GTK+ 2 Should wxWidgets be compiled into single library? No Should wxWidgets be compiled in debug mode? No Should wxWidgets be linked as a shared library?
No Should wxWidgets be compiled in Unicode mode? No What level of wxWidgets compatibility should be enabled? WxWidgets 2.2 no wxWidgets 2.4 yes Which libraries should wxWidgets use? Jpeg sys png sys regex sys tiff sys zlib sys odbc no expat sys libmspack no sdl no gnomeprint no Whenever you make a new build, check the output of configure to ensure the build will be correct for what you need. More options are available and they are explained by running configure –help. All that remains to do at this point is compile with make. Note that you should not run make install unless you have configured a build you wish to make use of system wide.
Programming As with many other toolkits, wxWidgets programs do not begin with a main function. Instead, main is implemented in the library itself and the application programmer takes over processing using the wxApp class. This is accomplished by creating a class which inherits from the wxApp class and implements the wxApp method OnInit. Typically in a small program the body of the OnInit implementation simply creates the application window, shows it, and returns true to indicate successful initialization.
Most wxWidgets programs center on two things. The first is building windows, and the second is interacting with those windows through event tables. Window construction is handled by constructing additional wxWidgets objects such as buttons and input boxes, then laying out those object using sizers. Programmers familiar with Java will equate sizers to Java constructs such as the GridBagLayout and others. Basically sizers are a way of describing where items in a window should be displayed and how their positions and sizes change with the window’s size. A more in depth discourse in sizers is available.
Event handling in wxWidgets is controlled using event tables. These tables are collections of C macros intended to reduce the work on the part of the programmer. This reduction is accomplished by reducing the amount of code written by the application programmer to link an event generated by an object to a function to execute when that event is generated. Below is a sample program which demonstrates all of the above concepts. It is a skeleton program that can be compiled and run with a functioning wxWidgets library. To compile this program, save the skel.h and skel.cpp files in a directory, then execute the following commands.
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$ g skel.cpp `/path/to/wxGTK-2.6.2/buildreleasestatic/wx-config -cppflags` -c $ g skel.o `/path/to/wxGTK-2.6.2/buildreleasestatic/wx-config -libs` -o skel $./skel The application has a wxFrame as its top level window. A wxFrame is a window which can contain items such as a menu bar and a status bar. Another window type is the wxPanel, whose explicit purpose is to contain controls such as buttons, text boxes, and drop down menus. In the OnInit method of the application class a mainWindow (wxFrame) is declared. The constructor of the mainWindow class then creates some menus, a status bar, and a wxPanel containing a wxTextCtrl. The last remaining note about wxWidgets specific code is that string literals are enclosed in a macro, T(“”) or wxT(“”). This macro ensures that string literals are processed correctly on both ASCII and unicode systems.
For more small wxWidgets programs, many of which are well documented, see the samples directory provided with the wxWidgets library source code. Distribution If the application developed is distributed in source code form, simply make sure that it can be compiled with the classic./configure && make && make install. Set your configure script up so that it is possible to point the build to a particular wx-config. This will make it easier to test with different wxWidgets builds, and provide end users a little more freedom when compiling. When packaging binary distributions of your program there are a few things to take into consideration. One is whether you expect end users to have the wxWidgets library installed.
If so, create a version of your program which links dynamically to a shared wxWidgets library. If not, compile wxWidgets statically in and require the user to have a compatible version of GTK installed. Either way, if program size is an issue upx is a must for binary compression. Tips Memory management has been simplified somewhat. It is rare that delete will need to be called on a wxWidgets object, especially if that object is a type of window or control. When a window is destroyed it also destroys all of its child windows. Most users will not have wxWidgets installed as a base system library.
For that reason, learning to create statically included libraries for applications is a must. Including the library statically means that a copy of wxWidgets is embedded as a literal part of the application binary.
It is difficult to provide a binary which will work for everyone, therefore if the application is open source let the distribution maintainers and package creators worry about this. Let the rest compile from source with their own options. When working on Mac OS X, install the Apple developer tools and be sure to statically compile wxWidgets into your program. Mac OS isn’t nearly the moving target Linux is for producing binaries. Be aware that version compatibility can be tricky and even small changes in the Mac OS X version number may break the binary. Additionally, end users will expect.app packages instead of just UNIX binaries and creating those requires adding more build commands to the build process. See the Mac section of the wxWidgets wiki for more information.
When working on Windows, MinGW and MSYS are very useful. Additionally, installing the MSYS developer’s toolkit will provide the GNU auto-tools. When MSYS is run through its rxvt terminal emulator, this guide may be followed on Windows in its entirety with one significant exception: to create a static library for static binaries, build wxWidgets without thread support. Otherwise the resulting library will depend on an MSYS DLL and fail to run on other systems.
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Having covered all three major supported platforms, it is easy to see how standardizing on GNU tools makes sense. On the other hand, wxWidgets itself relies on ‘bakefiles’ which produce native build files for the library on whatever platform and compiler being used. Bakefiles are XML files containing generic build instructions. Using them, it is possible to then produce a UNIX makefile and a Microsoft Visual Studio project or whatever else system a user might be running.
Cross Compiling Windows Applications Using the MingGW cross compiler and open source tools associated with the wine project it is possible to compile Windows applications on Linux. This may aid in simplifying development of wxWidgets applications. WxWidgets wiki articles describe the process with older versions of the software. The process has been verified to work with the newer versions: binutils 2.16.1, gcc 3.3, mingw runtime 3.9 (i386 precompiled), w32api 3.6 (i386 precompiled), and wxWidgets 2.6.2. Compilation was accomplished with GCC 3.3.6. When you arrive at the step involving the configuration and compilation of the wxWidgets library, the configure command should look similar to the following code. Note that the archive used should be the all ports combined tar.bz2/gz and not wxMSW-version.zip, otherwise there may be permission problems with the files and UNIX compilation may not be possible.
$ mkdir buildreleasestatic $ cd buildreleasestatic $ # configure command should be all on one line $./configure -prefix=/usr/local/i386-mingw32 -host=i386-mingw32 -target=i386-mingw32 -with-msw -disable-debug -disable-shared -enable-monolithic -disable-threads $ make $ make install # don't run this without reading below Again, do not run make install unless you have settled on a configuration to make available ‘system’ wide (system this time meaning the i386-mingw cross compiling environment). This is not as important as when dealing with a native library (wxGTK) since it will not have any impact on your Linux system. The rest of this section assumes you have settled on a configuration to install, but if not, direct your configure script to wherever the cross /path/to/buildreleasestatic/wx-config is located. Once compilation is finished simply point your own application’s configure script to /usr/local/i386-mingw32/bin/wx-config to produce a Windows binary (use that wx-config and i386-mingw32-g if not using a configure script).
Testing applications can be performed using wine.