GUI with wxWidgets

Printable View

11-14-2011
Vespasian

GUI with wxWidgets

After painstakingly trying to figure out what tools and libraries to use to make GUI's ive decided upon settling down to learn wxWidgets. I read its used by large corporations, institutions, engineering and the sciences, basically everyone. It seems to have the best of all worlds. Native feel I could go on and on...

The problem is I only know C so learning C++ to get to wxWidgets will take a while.

Anyway, question:

Its not enough for me to just know the wxWidgets library and functions. I must build it using drag drop features or a GUI builder. So my question is, what is the defacto, largest used, simply "best" GUI builder used for wxWidgets?
wxGlade? wxDesigner? wxForm builder? wxSmith?

My question then would be from where does one go from here?
They are just builders and not standalone IDE's right? For example, wxForm is actually included in Code::Blocks, so how do I get another builder, should it be better, to be included in Code::Blocks (which is my preferential IDE?

Third. Where does one find literature on these GUI builders on how to use them? By that I dont mean a mere wiki article with hello world but rather something exhaustive and detailed.
11-14-2011
manasij7479

>The problem is I only know C so learning C++ to get to wxWidgets will take a while.
'A while' may turn to a few years. I don't know about wxWidgets.. but Qt gave me quite a difficult ride about an year ago...and I knew quite a bit of C++ then.

>Its not enough for me to just know the wxWidgets library and functions.
But it is necessary to learn "the wxWidgets library and functions" if you expect to make good usage of the RAD tools associated.

>Where does one find literature on these GUI builders on how to use them?
Err... the graphical builders are made so that, when you already know how to program using the backend library, you can...without much literature jump right into it.
It isn't a very good idea to do it the opposite way... especially where documentation is lacking.
11-14-2011
MK27

wxWidgets is nice and not particularly hard, but if you have not done GUI programming at all, it is going to be somewhat bewildering. GUI's are a great example of something which looks very simple and straightforward, but often isn't.

You should get a basic grasp of C++, including OOP and the STL, before you start.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vespasian

Its not enough for me to just know the wxWidgets library and functions. I must build it using drag drop features or a GUI builder. So my question is, what is the defacto, largest used, simply "best" GUI builder used for wxWidgets?
wxGlade? wxDesigner? wxForm builder? wxSmith?

I'm too stuck up for builders, myself, but they probably can save you some time. Beware that apps built with gtk glade (so, perhaps, wxGlade) actually use xml files, etc, at runtime -- ie, you do not get a nice tidy executable. I have a hunch this means some other limitations in terms of your ability to tweak things, etc (especially considering wx is itself an interface to other libraries, however, to be fair, I have seen some nice stuff done with gtk glade). It could be that all such builder things do this, I dunno.

Quote:

Third. Where does one find literature on these GUI builders on how to use them? By that I dont mean a mere wiki article with hello world but rather something exhaustive and detailed.

Oh of course the developers provide that, don't they, lol? Maybe not...

There is a wx forum that is I think reasonably active:

wxWidgets Discussion Forum • Index page