wxWindows and GNOME

[Robert Roebling <roebling uni-freiburg de>]

  Hi GNOMErs,

I´m the main author of the GTK port of the wxWindows GUI
library. I would think that some people know about this
project, but I´d still like to outline in brevity what it
is and - more importantly - what it is for.

wxWindows is a C++ library (or actually several) that makes
it possible to write GUI programs on different platforms
from the same source code. Currently, there are four different
versions of wxWindows, one for Win32 and Win16, one for the
MacOS 8.X, one for Motif and mine for the GTK. wxWindows also
comes with Python bindings (wxPython) that are becoming more
and more popular and might replace TkInter as the "standard"
GUI for Python programs.

wxWindows´ goals and therefore its design principles are quite
different from GNOME´s - so different that some people will
certainly consider it incompatible with GNOME, others such as
me see an opportunity in this fact.

It is the aim of wxWindows, to make it possible to write programs
as easy as possible on various platforms, compiling with various
compilers etc, that it has become out main goal to make wxWindows
independent of everything else - save the toolkit itself. I even
had to remove its usage of the stdc++ classes as well as the GNU
libtool and GNU automake tools for its building system to reach
that goal. wxWindows also doesn´t use RTTI, exceptions or templates
internally and we included verbatim versions of zlib, libpng and
libjpeg to avoid forcing users to download them separately or
having troubles with wrong versions of either of them.

wxWindows provides classes for such "non-GUI" aspects as config
files (actually registry on Win32), mimetypes, threads, image
and sound manipulation, PostScript printing and various streams
like Java or Qt have them. wxWindows also has what might be the
best documented API around and two books are currently being
written about wxWindows.

I have so far never posted to this list (or related ones) telling
others how good wxWindows is, because it wasn´t perfect and always
was work in progress - this has changed now :-) 

I saw Mr. Elliot´s esoteric post about a "final" GNOME 1.0 release
and its release date might coincide with the release of wxGTK 2.1,
both using GTK 1.2 and therefore I am asking for wxGTK to be included
in this GNOME release.

Why should you do that? Maybe you have read various posts on Slashdot,
the Borland survey or some comments about toolkits during the LinuxWorld
circus and it seems that not all people think that the current C and
GNOME APIs offer solutions to all problems, well, neither does wxGTK, 
but it does offer what maybe some people are looking for and what GNOME
still fails to deliver. Up to now, GNOME cannot boast a C++ toolkit as
versatile and elegant as Qt and I doubt that GTK-- even tries to get
there - with wxWindows it finally could. And offering a cross-platform
API won´t drive people away either.

What I am asking for is to include the wxGTK-RPM along the other GNOME
libs (and maybe the wxGTK-devel-RPM and docs in similar places) just
the way (or at least similar to the point of binary compatibility) as
the are on my homepage, which BTW is at

  http://wesley.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~wxxt

including wxWindows´ on-line documentation and an on-line hello world.

  Robert

Robert Roebling <roebling@ruf.uni-freiburg.de>