Slashdot Mirror
OpenGL Widget Set Recommendations?
"GLUI provides a flexible windowing system and a rich selection of widgets (buttons, checkboxes, radio button sets, spinners, text boxes, arcballs, dividers, packing panels, packing columns, etc.). GLUI's design is very straightforward, and the docs and examples are extremely well done. GLUI is highly portable, since it depends only on OpenGL and Glut.
GLOW is 'a cross-platform object-oriented framework for building interactive applications using OpenGL or similar APIs such as Mesa.' GLOW is basically an elegant C++ wrapper around Glut, providing push buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, scroll bars, sliders, text fields, menus, etc. This is a really nice description of GLOW, including comparisons to GLUI and MUI.
Speaking of MUI, Steve Baker's advice is basically 'just don't.' Instead, Steve recommends PUI, which he wrote. :) Actually, he speaks very highly of GLUI, and does a nice job of pointing out the subtle differences between GLUI and PUI.
PUI is part of PLIB, a rich and vibrant set of libraries for cross-platform game development. This is a wonderful intro to PUI. Go read it right now. Really. PUI itself does all the sorts of stuff I'm looking for, and perhaps more. It looks to be very stable and mature, too.
LibUFO is a C++ widget set for OpenGL, currently in alpha. Features include pluggable look and feel, theme support, and layout manager support. LibUFO can be used with GLUT, SDL or any native GL context, so it is highly portable, too. Except for the fact that this is only alpha code at this point, it looks quite nice.
FOX is a C++ toolkit for developing cross-platform GUI apps. It seems like a fairly standard C++ framework, with built-in OpenGL widgets, too. By all accounts, FOX is quite mature and stable, with a fairly active developer base. FOX supports many OSes, but not, unfortunately, the Mac. And yes, I could easily hack out Mac support myself, but I don't want to do that-- I want to write my app.
FLTK is another cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit with OpenGL support. The advantage of FLTK over FOX is that FLTK supports MacOS X (not 9.x and earlier-- too bad).
DirectFB is a library built on top of a framebuffer device such as the Linux framebuffer or SDL. There seems to be some 3D support in there via DirectFBGL, though the docs say that there is no hardware acceleration support (i.e. Mesa vs OpenGL). The thing that makes DirectFB particularly attractive is the fact that Gtk/Gdk has been ported to it.
SDL and ParaGUI are also an attractive option. SDL is insanely portable, and ParaGUI is a wonderful GUI/widget toolkit that runs on top of SDL. You really need to see the ParaGUI demos running to appreciate how slick it is. The screenshots are nice and all, but they don't do it justice. As well, ParaGUI is really slick in its support for themes, XML, and Python.
PicoGUI was a recent SlashDotting victim. As mentioned at that time, PicoGUI is actually a sophisticated client-server framework, capable of running in a wide variety of environments, including on top of OpenGL. There is plenty of info at the PicoGUI FAQ, including a few comments that suggest it would be a perfectly reasonable choice for what I'm looking at doing. Given the scope of what PicoGUI is trying to achieve, I'm a little nervous that it might be overkill for what I want to do.
Fresco is another client-server framework which some may have previously known as Berlin. Fresco seems very cool, but again, I suspect it is overkill for what I'm doing.
The GUI Toolkit/Framework Page is also an excellent resource for cross-platform development of all stripes.
And the OpenGL Toolkit FAQ is also an excellent resource with special emphasis on OpenGL."
wxWindows gives you a single, easy-to-use API for writing GUI applications on multiple platforms. Link with the appropriate library for your platform (Windows/Unix/Mac, others coming shortly) and compiler (almost any popular C++ compiler), and your application will adopt the look and feel appropriate to that platform. On top of great GUI functionality, wxWindows gives you: online help, network programming, streams, clipboard and drag and drop, multithreading, image loading and saving in a variety of popular formats, database support, HTML viewing and printing, and much much more.
"Excellent, stable and intuitive API. Very straightforward to learn and easy to port Java, X11 and Win32 code to."
"Thanks heaps for the best piece of software I've ever come across."
"wxWindows 2 has been an absolute dream."
"I've never had an easier porting experience."
"I never thought that cross-platform development could be so easy and simply cool."
"I have used wxWindows in the past very successfully on multiple projects, and think it's the bee's knees. Thanks for everything!"
"wxWindows is jaw dropping amazing. Community support from the mailing list is extraordinary. Are you sure this is free?"
"wxWindows is one of the most magnificent development projects in existence.."
You might want to look into wxWindows It's a cross-platform GUI library that works using platforms' native GUIs, so that your app will take on the look of the platform you build it on. It supports OpenGL nicely, and has what is, in my opinion at least, a beautiful, intuitive OO C++ interface.
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
Coin3D (http://www.coin3d.org) is a GPL rendition of the Open Inventor toolkit by SGI. This toolkit is a C++ class heirarchy that overlays OpenGL and is really quite nice. It has rendering and scene manipulation tools like material editors. The toolkit has bindings for Trolltechs Qt, and they are working on one for Gtk. I think they have Motif. I'm pretty sure it works on Lintel and MacOS X. I got working on my Mac with Yellow Dog Linux on it.
Good luck.
For your GUI, take a look at GNUstep. It supports Linux, the BSDs, Solaris and Windows and is (pretty much) compatible with Cocoa.
For your 3D graphic stuff, take a look at the GNU 3DKit.
For a layer to put between OpenGL and your OS of choice, SDL http://www.libsdl.org/ is more than OK. It even works on PlayStation 2! Don't know if OpenGL will run on a PS2 though =P
SDL doesn't have a GUI actually, but there are several GUIs made FOR SDL by other people.
Good luck!
You definitely forgot Qt. The only downside is that it's commercial on Win32 (unless you're running MSVC6), apart from that it does its job very well, and has a very reasonable OpenGL widget.
As for wxWindows (which others have suggested), I tried it some time ago and I think it truly sucked. Hopefully it has improved since then :-)
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
Another big one which you've missed is the GTK. It has a glarea module for OpenGL drawing areas, and has the advantage of a very strong design. On the other hand, since your focus is on building an OpenGL-based system, why bother with the overhead of a widget set at all? Don't reject the idea out of hand. Not having a pre-designed widget set will force you to think carefully about your interface. In my opinion, this is the major shortcoming of most commercial modelling systems - a counter-intuitive UI.
wxWindows
It does exactly what you describe. It provides a single API, that, when linked with the appropriate platform's libs, creates the GUI using that platforms GUI.
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
It works perfectly OK on any Unix System and also in Win32.
I wrote several CAD/CAM applications for Linux using this combination and the port to Windows took only two afternoons.
It was just a question of downloading all the stuff for win32 and I only had to correct some syntax problemas and change some header files in VC++ (some IFDEFs).
I also had one more problem with transient windows, because sometimes the dialog windows would move to the back of the main window and get invisible, but I solved that with a IFDEF _WIN32 and a call to a native WIN32 API function
Even the internationalization stuff works in WIN32.
In this process I always try to use only GTK+ widgets and avoid using Gnome stuff.
On the other hand, the user interface builder glade generates perfectly portable code.
While this is true for cross-platform applications which operate identically in each environment, those that assume the look and feel of the target system can greatly reduce the problem. I highly recommend wxWindows as a candidate API for your project as it automatically will make adjustments for you. The documentation is also quite good and there is a solid community of developers from which to learn. (I used it this last semester on an assignment - it's awesome.)
If you absolutely need your widgets to be a part of the 3D environment... you're going to have to keep looking.
Good luck!
I have done some OpenGL work with GTK+.
GTK+ does not support OpenGL out of the box, so to speak, but you can get a package called gtkglarea which adds an OpenGL widget.
If you use GTK+ v1.2, then gtkglarea v1.2.x packages are easy to find and come with many distros (e.g. Redhat).
However, I would recommend that you use GTK+ 2.x, since you are coding a new application, and GTK+ 2.x is much improved. There is no *official* version of gtkglarea for GTK+ 2.0 though. HOWEVER, you can get gtkglarea v1.99.0. Look on developer.gnome.org. I think.
Links:
Gnome ftp site
Gnome ftp mirror
GTK+'s main advantages are its maturity, its solid design, and its comprehensive selection of widgets. If your application is going to reach an appreciable size, then you will want a good widget set like GTK+.
As a C++ programmer, I find GTK+'s reliance on vanilla C to be a little irritating, however, you can gtk GTK-- which is a C++ wrapper for it. I prefer to use GTK+ directly though, so I interface my C++ code with GTK+ by using static member functions for callbacks.
Hope that helps
Mr. Meanie
Don't tell me you don't know Qt !!! it's the best, totally cross platform, and definitely preserving the look and feel of the host O/S. And it is not only a GUI toolkit, it has everything:
native look and feel
database support
OpenGL support
XML through SAX and DOM implementations
true componentatization through the signal-and-slot mechanism
theme support
app settings and DLL transparent handling
lots of container templates which are easy to use
full visual environment intergrated nicely with various IDEs
source code 100% compatibility from platform to platform
multithreading and synchronization abstraction using the native O/S
networking abstraction using the native O/S
regular expression handling
HTML support
internationalization support with the easiest handling of UTF-8, ASCII and UNICODE formats
some of the best widget sets with full geometry management
follows C++ logic, unlike other toolkits like MFC or wxWindows
Its only downside is that you have to pay for it, but it is definitely worth it, because it is simply the best toolkit out there!!!
For my scientific visualization project, I use Qt and its QGLWidget for OpenGL vis. It features nice communication to other widgets, easy mouse event interception, and you can share display lists across multiple views. If you intend your app to be free, then they cost you nothing. I have used wxWindows and GTK before, and Qt is vastly superior in my opinion.