OpenGL Widget Set Recommendations?

rrwood asks: "I'm starting work on what is more or less an open-source 3D modeling application, and I'd like to make it as cross-platform as possible (Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, etc.). OpenGL takes care of the 3D rendering I'm going to need, but I also need some sort of widget set, and I'm looking for advice as to what to use in that regard. I've done my Google homework and have come up with the following, but would like feedback from anyone who has already used any of these, or has recommendations about anything I may have missed. Yes, I know about Blender, and be reassured I am not planning on reinventing that wheel, okay? :-) So, here's what I've found so far. As I said, if anyone can add to this list or share his/her experiences actually working with any of these, that would be greatly appreciated."

"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."

Comments

Additional requirement - Widgets on textures!

[kbonin]

I'd throw out an additional requirement for an ideal OpenGL GUI library, one that's lead me to start developing my own (It'll be open source when done.)

It'd be nice if a cross-platform widget/GUI library existed that would allow me to place the GUI's into the environment, by rendering to textures or virtual GUI planes, instead of just as yet another 2d desktop library. Its not TOO much additional work if done from the beginning...

Think of the fun you could have w/ full GUI support in the environment. A 3d embeddable Gecko control, anyone? :) (Wish that code was cleaner...)

wxWindows, FLTK

[g4dget]

If your needs are modest, you might want to use FLTK. It's simple and you can link with it statically. If you need a full-blown widget set, wxWindows is a good choice. Both of them let you embed OpenGL windows inside the GUI. They are not implemented using OpenGL as the graphics layer, however: they use whatever native GUI there is and embedd OpenGL windows.

I would recommend against using widget sets with OpenGL as a graphics layer unless you really need it: OpenGL is less than ideal for that purpose.

Re:wxWindows, FLTK

[ikoleverhate]

Worth pointing out that FLTK not only lets you have OpenGL windows inside it's windows, but that ALL it's widgets' draw functions can contain OpenGL code (whether a specific OpenGL widget or not). This means you can have lit and textured buttons for example, and have the mouse pointer as a light source. ;)

I'm not sure if any of the others do the same as I have never used them.

Cross platform widgets are BAD

[JFMulder]

Of course, from a technological angle, cross-platform widgets (we'll call them CPW from now on) are an elegant solution. Design your UI once, and you're done. This seem like A Good Thing.

The problem with CPW is that it gives more time to the user to adapt to your widgets. Of course, one can argue that once you can use the widgets in one environment, you can use them everywhere. That is true. The problem is that not all your users are as good with computers as you are, and it may put an extra strain on the user to learn between the basics of your system and the host OS. How do you drag and drop? How do you move around windows? What happens when you double click on the top? Does it maximise? Does it roll up just to show the title bar?

Take a clue from the major players in the industry. From what I've heard, Adobe updated PhotoShop to give it the Mac OS X look and feel by using it's native widgets. Many companies are now making wrappers around existing library calls, instead of making widgets. That way you have a unified API for all your supported platforms to design your UI on, but also have the advantage of keeping the usual behaviour and look and feel of an application.

Sadly, I don't know of any public library that accomplishes this. But I'm sure that if you looked around enough, you should be able to find a few.

Good luck!

prototyping is important

[FranTaylor]

I've written some very nice 3-D apps using OpenInventor and Motif. OpenInventor is excellent for prototyping 3-D apps. I worked on a simulator project where we used OpenInventor, Motif and Scheme. We had Scheme bindings for everything. Since Scheme is interpreted, we could make changes "on-the-fly" without recompiling or even restarting the program.

Prototyping tools are different from production tools. It's okay (even preferable) to prototype in one environment, and write the deliverable in another. 3-D design is not cut-and dried, so you will spend a lot of time messing with how things look. This is much easier in an interpreted world than in one that requires compiling and linking of big C++ executables every time you decide that the red cube is a little too big.

Togl (also check out ayam3d)

[BLAG-blast]

Hey,

You might want to take a look at Togl

It's a Tcl/Tk widget, it's pretty friendly and cross platform. There are a couple of 3D modellers using Togl. One of them is called Ayam3d (it's kind of like Maya but not, it's also open source). AC3D is the other modeller I know using Togl, and it's shareware.

Java AWT or Swing and Java 3D.

[Randolpho]

No mentions of this combination yet, so I thought I'd drop one. If you want cross-platform compatibility, Java is the best way to go. Java 3d has a really good OGL set up as a Scene Graph API. Mix in AWT or Swing, and you've essentially got yourself an entire cross-platform system already set up.