07766e7d72
contributed by Craig Earls. git-svn-id: file:///fltk/svn/fltk/trunk@207 ea41ed52-d2ee-0310-a9c1-e6b18d33e121
264 lines
10 KiB
HTML
264 lines
10 KiB
HTML
<HTML>
|
|
<BODY>
|
|
|
|
<H1 ALIGN=RIGHT><A NAME="intro">1 - Introduction to FLTK</A></H1>
|
|
|
|
The Fast Light Tool Kit ("FLTK", pronounced "fulltick") is a LGPL'd C++
|
|
graphical user interface toolkit for X (UNIX®), OpenGL®, and
|
|
Microsoft® Windows® NT 4.0, 95, or 98. It was originally
|
|
developed by Mr. Bill Spitzak and is currently maintained by a small
|
|
group of developers across the world with a central repository in the
|
|
US.
|
|
|
|
<h2>History of FLTK</h2>
|
|
|
|
It has always been Bill's belief that the GUI API of all modern systems
|
|
is much too high level. Toolkits (even FL) are <i>not</i> what should
|
|
be provided and documented as part of an operating system. The system
|
|
only has to provide arbitrary shaped but featureless windows, a
|
|
powerful set of graphics drawing calls, and a simple <i>unalterable</i>
|
|
method of delivering events to the owners of the windows. NeXT (if you
|
|
ignored NextStep) provided this, but they chose to hide it and tried to
|
|
push their own baroque toolkit instead...
|
|
|
|
<p>Many of the ideas in FLTK were developed on a NeXT (but <i>not</i>
|
|
using NextStep) in 1987 in a C toolkit Bill called "views". Here he
|
|
came up with passing events downward in the tree and having the handle
|
|
routine return a value indicating the used the event, and the
|
|
table-driven menus. In general he was trying to prove that complex UI
|
|
ideas could be entirely implemented in a user space toolkit, with no
|
|
knowledge or support by the system.
|
|
|
|
<p>After going to film school for a few years, Bill worked at Sun
|
|
Microsystems on the (doomed) NeWS project. Here he found an even
|
|
better and cleaner windowing system, and he reimplemented "views" atop
|
|
that. NeWS did have an unnecessarily complex method of delivering
|
|
events which hurt it. But the designers did admit that perhaps the
|
|
user could write just as good of a button as they could, and officially
|
|
exposed the lower level interface.
|
|
|
|
<p>With the death of NeWS Bill realized that he would have to live with
|
|
X. The biggest problem with X is the "window manager", which means
|
|
that the toolkit can no longer control the window borders or drag the
|
|
window around.
|
|
|
|
<p>At Digital Domain Bill discovered another toolkit, "Forms". Forms was
|
|
similar to his work, but provided many more widgets, since it was used
|
|
in many real applications, rather then as theoretical work. He decided
|
|
to use Forms, except he integrated his table-driven menus into it.
|
|
Several very large programs were created using this version of Forms.
|
|
|
|
<p>The need to switch to OpenGL and GLX, portability, and a desire to
|
|
use C++ subclassing required a rewrite of Forms. This produced the
|
|
first version of FLTK. The conversion to C++ required so many changes
|
|
it made it impossible to recompile any Forms objects. Since it was
|
|
incompatible anyway, Bill decided to incorporate his older ideas as
|
|
much as possible by simplifying the lower level interface and the event
|
|
passing mechanisim.
|
|
|
|
<p>Bill received permission to release it for free on the Internet,
|
|
with the GNU general public license. Response from Internet users
|
|
indicated that the Linux market dwarfed the SGI and high-speed GL
|
|
market, so he rewrote it to use X for all drawing, greatly speeding it
|
|
up on these machines. That is the version you have now.
|
|
|
|
<p>Digital Domain has since withdrawn support for FLTK. While Bill is
|
|
no longer able to actively develop it, he still contributes to FLTK in
|
|
his free time and is a part of the FLTK development team.
|
|
|
|
<h2>Features</h2>
|
|
|
|
FLTK was designed to be statically linked. This was done by splitting it
|
|
into many small objects and desigining it so that functions that are not
|
|
used do not have pointers to them in the parts that are used, and thus
|
|
do not get linked in. This allows you to make an easy-to-install program,
|
|
or to modify FLTK to the exact requirements of your application, without
|
|
worrying about bloat. FLTK works fine as a shared library, though, and
|
|
has started being included on Linux distributions.
|
|
|
|
<p>Here are some of the core features unique to FLTK:
|
|
|
|
<ul>
|
|
<li>sizeof(Fl_Widget) == 40 to 48.</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>The "core" (the "hello" program compiled & linked with a static FLTK
|
|
library using gcc on a 486 and then stripped) is 39.5K.</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>A program including every widget is less than 108K. Does not use
|
|
macros, templates, multiple inheritance, or exceptions.</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>Written directly atop Xlib (or WIN32) for maximum speed,
|
|
and carefully optimized for code size and performance.</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>Precise low-level compatability between the X11 and WIN32
|
|
version (only about 10% of the code is different).</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>Interactive user interface builder program. Output is
|
|
human-readable and editable C++ source code.</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>Support for the X11 double buffering extension (emulation
|
|
if not available and under Windows.)</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>Support for X11 overlay hardware (emulation if none and
|
|
under WIN32.)</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>Very small & fast portable 2-D drawing library to hide
|
|
Xlib and WIN32.</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>OpenGL/Mesa drawing area widget.</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>Support for OpenGL overlay hardware on both X11 and WIN32.
|
|
Emulation if none.</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>Text input fields with Emacs key bindings, X cut &
|
|
paste, and foreign letter compose!</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>Compatibility header file for the GLUT library.</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>Compatibility header file for the XForms library.</li>
|
|
|
|
<li>Much too much to list here...</li>
|
|
</ul>
|
|
|
|
<h2>Licensing</h2>
|
|
|
|
FLTK comes with complete free source code. FLTK is available under the
|
|
terms of the <a href="#licensing">GNU Library General Public
|
|
License</a>. Contrary to popular belief, it can be used in commercial
|
|
software! (Even Bill Gates could use it.)
|
|
|
|
<h2>What Does "FLTK" Mean?</h2>
|
|
|
|
FLTK was originally designed to be compatable with the Forms Library written
|
|
for SGI machines. In that library all the functions and structures started
|
|
with "fl_". This naming was extended to all new methods and widgets in
|
|
the C++ library, and this prefix was taken as the name of the library.
|
|
It is almost impossible to search for "FL" on the Internet, due to the
|
|
fact that it is also the abbreviation for Florida. After much debating
|
|
and searching for a new name for the toolkit, which was already in use
|
|
by several people, Bill came up with "FLTK", and even a bogus excuse that
|
|
it stands for "The Fast Light Tool Kit".
|
|
|
|
<h2>Building and Installing FLTK Under UNIX</h2>
|
|
|
|
In most cases you can just type "make". This will run configure with
|
|
the default of no options and then compile everything.
|
|
|
|
<p>FLTK uses GNU autoconf to configure itself for your UNIX platform. The
|
|
main things that the configure script will look for are the X11, OpenGL
|
|
(or Mesa), and JPEG header and library files. Make sure that they
|
|
are in the standard include/library locations.
|
|
|
|
<p>You can run configure yourself to get the exact setup you need. Type
|
|
"./configure <options>", where options are:
|
|
|
|
<dl>
|
|
<dt>--enable-debug</dt>
|
|
|
|
<dd>Enable debugging code & symbols</dd>
|
|
|
|
<dt>--enable-shared</dt>
|
|
|
|
<dd>Enable generation of shared libraries</dd>
|
|
|
|
<dt>--bindir=/path</dt>
|
|
|
|
<dd>Set the location for executables [default = /usr/local/bin]</dd>
|
|
|
|
<dt>--libdir=/path</dt>
|
|
|
|
<dd>Set the location for libraries [default = /usr/local/lib]</dd>
|
|
|
|
<dt>--includedir=/path</dt>
|
|
|
|
<dd>Set the location for include files. [default = /usr/local/include]</dd>
|
|
|
|
<dt>--prefix=/dir</dt>
|
|
|
|
<dd>Set the directory prefix for files [default = /usr/local]</dd>
|
|
</dl>
|
|
|
|
When the configure script is done you can just run the "make" command.
|
|
This will build the library, FLUID tool, and all of the test programs.
|
|
|
|
<p>To install the library, become root and type "make install". This
|
|
will copy the "fluid" executable to "bindir", the header files to "includedir",
|
|
and the library files to "libdir".
|
|
|
|
<h2>Building FLTK Under Micrsoft Windows</h2>
|
|
|
|
There are two ways to build FLTK under Microsoft Windows. The first
|
|
is to use the Visual C++ 5.0 project files under the "visualc" directory.
|
|
Just open (or double-click on) the "fltk.dsw" file to get the whole shebang.
|
|
|
|
<p>The second method is to use a GNU-based development tool with the files
|
|
in the "makefiles" directory. To build using one of these tools simply
|
|
copy the appropriate makeinclude and config files to the main directory
|
|
and do a make:
|
|
|
|
<ul><pre>
|
|
cp makefiles/makeinclude.<env> makeinclude
|
|
cp makefiles/config.<env> config.h
|
|
make
|
|
</pre></ul>
|
|
|
|
<h2>Building FLTK Under OS/2</h2>
|
|
|
|
The current OS/2 build requires XFree86 for OS/2 to work. A native
|
|
Presentation Manager version has not been implemented yet (volunteers are
|
|
welcome!).
|
|
|
|
<p>To build the XFree86 version of FLTK for OS/2, copy the appropriate
|
|
makeinclude and config files to the main directory and do a make:
|
|
|
|
<ul><pre>
|
|
cp makefiles/Makefile.os2x Makefile
|
|
cp makefiles/makeinclude.os2x makeinclude
|
|
cp makefiles/config.os2x config.h
|
|
make
|
|
</pre></ul>
|
|
|
|
<h2>Internet Resources</h2>
|
|
|
|
FLTK is available on the 'net in a bunch of locations:
|
|
|
|
<dl>
|
|
<dt>WWW</dt>
|
|
|
|
<dd><a href="http://fltk.easysw.com">http://fltk.easysw.com</a></dd>
|
|
|
|
<dt>FTP</dt>
|
|
|
|
<dd><a href="ftp://ftp.easysw.com/pub/fltk">ftp://ftp.easysw.com/pub/fltk</a></dd>
|
|
|
|
<dd><a href="ftp://ftp.funet.fi/mirrors/ftp.easysw.com/pub/fltk">ftp://ftp.funet.fi/mirrors/ftp.easysw.com/pub/fltk</a></dd>
|
|
|
|
<dd><a href="ftp://ftp.northamerica.net/pub/ESP/fltk">ftp.northamerica.net/pub/ESP/fltk</a><br></dd>
|
|
|
|
<dt>EMail</dt>
|
|
|
|
<dd><a href="mailto:fltk@easysw.com">fltk@easysw.com</a> [see instructions below]</dd>
|
|
|
|
<dd><a href="mailto:fltk-bugs@easysw.com">fltk-bugs@easysw.com</a> [for reporting bugs]</dd>
|
|
</dl>
|
|
|
|
To send a message to the FLTK mailing list ("fltk@easysw.com") you must
|
|
first join the list. Non-member submissions are blocked to avoid
|
|
problems with SPAM...
|
|
|
|
<p>To join the FLTK mailing list, send a message to "majordomo@easysw.com"
|
|
with "subscribe fltk" in the message body. A digest of this list is available
|
|
by subscribing to the "fltk-digest" mailing list.
|
|
|
|
<h2>Reporting Bugs</h2>
|
|
|
|
To report a bug in FLTK, send an email to "fltk-bugs@easysw.com". Please
|
|
include the FLTK version, operating system & version, and compiler
|
|
that you are using when describing the bug or problem.
|
|
|
|
<p>For general support and questions, please use the FLTK mailing list
|
|
at "fltk@easysw.com".
|
|
|
|
</body>
|
|
</html>
|