Fox toolkit

FOX toolkit
Developer(s) Jeroen van der Zijp, FOX community
Stable release 1.6.50 / April 14, 2014 (2014-04-14)
Preview release 1.7.52 / July 1, 2015 (2015-07-01)
Written in C++
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Development Library
License GNU Lesser General Public License
Website fox-toolkit.org

The FOX toolkit is an open source, cross-platform widget toolkit, that is, a library of basic elements for building a graphical user interface (GUI). FOX stands for Free Objects for X.

It features a hard-wired Windows 95-style theme available for both Microsoft Windows itself as well as the X Window System (which is used on many UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems).[1]

The FOX toolkit has been released under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence. Development began 1997 by Jeroen van der Zijp while he was affiliated at CFDRC. Since then, Jeroen van der Zijp maintains the core library and test applications, with the help of a growing user community.

The FOX toolkit is written in C++, with language bindings available for Python, Ruby and Eiffel. The FOX source code distribution supports building with many different (commercial and free) C++ compilers.

Cross-platform compatibility

FOX differentiates itself in the following way from other cross-platform toolkits:

All of these toolkits have some support for programming natively on Mac OS and/or Mac OS X platforms, which FOX currently does not support.

FOX uses a technique similar to the Java Swing-style approach to display a graphical user interface to the screen, using only graphical primitives available on that platform, as opposed to the original Java AWT-style approach which used native widgets. This means that applications will have a similar look and feel across platforms. In theory, porting FOX to a new platform should also be easier than implementing support for native widgets.

On the downside, it usually means that FOX applications will look and feel different from native applications for those platforms, which some users may find confusing. Also, certain native platform features may not be available immediately, such as comprehensive printing support or internationalized input handling, because they will need to be re-implemented in a cross-platform way before they can be used in FOX.

Messaging system

FOX offers a transparent bi-directional messaging system. Each Widget sends its message to a certain target. Each message is composed by a selector that identifies its kind and an id that is unique and provided by the widget's enumeration. The advantage is that each widget can call a target widget's method in a transparent manner, even if the method does not exist. Vice versa, in the implementation of the individual message handler, since the sender is known, the target can also dispatch a message to the sender. This is a particularly important feature in component oriented software, where components may be written by different people, or even different organizations.

The FOX messaging system simplifies the GUI update strategy: during widget update, the widgets can ask from their targets to update them. This means that a command message does not also have to explicitly update any widgets as it is typical. In case an application implements N command messages each updating M widgets, then M*N updates must be executed and at most M*N messages must be implemented. On the other hand, if widgets request for update, only N command messages and at most M update messages are implemented. This strategy separates the GUI update from data changes, making the GUI a real-time reflection of the underlying data structures.

Hello World

The following example creates a FOX application and a dialog with a button on C++:

#include "fx.h"

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  FXApp application("Hello", "FoxTest");
  application.init(argc, argv);
  FXMainWindow *main=new FXMainWindow(&application, "Hello", NULL, NULL, DECOR_ALL);
  new FXButton(main, "&Hello, World!", NULL, &application, FXApp::ID_QUIT);
  application.create();
  main->show(PLACEMENT_SCREEN);
  return application.run();
}

Also you can creates dialogs with Python 2.2, Ruby and Eiffel :

FXPy

#! /usr/bin/env python
 
from FXPy.fox import *
import sys
 
def runme():
    app = FXApp('Hello', 'Test')
    app.init(sys.argv)
    main = FXMainWindow(app, 'Hello', None, None, DECOR_ALL)
    button = FXButton(main, '&Hello, World!', None, app, FXApp.ID_QUIT);
    app.create()
    main.show(PLACEMENT_SCREEN)
    app.run()
 
if __name__ == '__main__':
    runme()

FXRuby

require 'fox16'
 
include Fox
 
application = FXApp.new("Hello", "FoxTest")
main = FXMainWindow.new(application, "Hi", nil, nil, DECOR_ALL)
FXButton.new(main, "&Hello, World!", nil, application, FXApp::ID_QUIT, 
    LAYOUT_FILL_X | BUTTON_TOOLBAR | FRAME_RAISED | FRAME_THICK)
application.create()
main.show(PLACEMENT_SCREEN)
application.run()

Software built on FOX

See also

References

  1. ↑ FOX Toolkit, GUI Toolkits for The X Window System, by Leslie Polzer, 27 Jul 2003, freshmeat.net
  2. ↑ "Abaqus FEA / Version 6.7 Open Source Programs". Archived from the original on 2007-11-09. Retrieved 2007-12-09.
  3. ↑ "Acronis licensing information". Retrieved 2007-12-08.

External links

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