FOX, Fltk, and other specialty GUI toolkits

Let's recall the boundaries for this series. We're looking at GUI toolkits applicable to a broad range of office automation and engineering tasks, including system administration, medium-duty engineering automation and analysis, point-of-sale transactions, and so on. Widget set is still the rough synonym for toolkit in some domains. We'll leave specialized three-dimensional, virtual reality (VR), and gaming toolkits for another day, but note that the general-purpose toolkits we discuss have been the basis for many fine games and VR projects.

We also require that our toolkits be portable at least across the leading Unix and Windows platforms, and across a range of conventional development languages. Several fascinating GUI models, including DrScheme, Clean, NeXT, MetaCard, a couple of different Smalltalk and Forth libraries, Delphi, and G2, exhibit remarkable productivity under at least some circumstances. These all deserve consideration at another time; however, they don't fit the current series.

Web wins out

Unlikely as it would have seemed a decade ago, the real winner of the widget wars is the Web. The single toolkit we find ourselves most often using is the one HTML specifies.

Of course, thousands of books describe Web applications or selected aspects of them. Distill from these a pair of conclusions that fit our comparison:

• Deployment matters. Numerous times, we've heard professional developers moan about how impoverished and inadequate browsers are as a GUI. It doesn't matter, though, to the decision-makers who end up buying Web solutions that they understand rather than the fragile, handcrafted elaborations that programmers often prefer.

Even if you know you're going to a different technology for a final delivery, it's OK to prototype applications with a simple Web design. You can often learn crucial usability results with that first rough draft.

• The Web can do more than you realize. We periodically document in our Regular Expressions column the wonderful things that experts do with JavaScript, plug-ins, and an assortment of server-side facilities. The growing acceptance of DHTML gives Web applications approximately the full range of GUI capabilities that other toolkits enjoy.

Plenty of the world's applications require no more than a bit of Web sophistication. If this kind of work appeals to you, you'll be busy for a long time.

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