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Collecting resources and notes on wxwindows.

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Recommended Resources

Porting Windows applications to Linux doesn't have to involve a retraining nightmare. Markus Neifer shows how to port MFC using wxWindows, giving a user's guide to this open source GUI toolkit and providing a complete, step-by-step porting example.
Still maintaining that legacy Windows application built using Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), but now you have clients requesting a Linux version? You may have highly skilled MFC developers on your team, but how do you come up to speed with Linux development? Don't panic; this article is for you. With the help of wxWindows, a portable GUI toolkit for C++ and Python, I'll show you how to port a Windows-only MFC application to Linux using a Multiple Document Interface (MDI) text editor as an example. A small application like this helps focus the discussion on the nuts and bolts of porting the framework and prevents us from getting lost in a sea of code. Complete source code for both the MFC application and the wxWindows application is available in the Resources section later in this article.

My comments: Excellent article -- I need to read again -- it is also useful to me to help me learn C++. I've been subscribed to the wxwindows developer's list for quite a while (probably close to two years) thinking wxwindows was something I wanted to learn, but somehow this article but a lot of things into focus for me.

I am surprised that the code required for a wxwindows application is as different from that required for windows as it apparently is -- (naively?) I thought that the objective of such a toolkit would be closer to allowing you to simply move the code, and wxwindows would provide things like dlls or similar libraries that would allow the same code to work on Linux as works on Windows. Why that's not the case is still a question on my mind.

PS: Pay attention to the screen shots -- they illustrate another pet peeve of mine about Linux. Look how similar the wxwindows on Windows screen shot is to the Windows application screen shot -- then note how different (and uglier, clunkier, ...) the wxwindows screen shot is. This may be more a function of something other than Linux (gtk, Motif, lesstif, ...), but it is an aggravation nevertheless. Maybe they look better under KDE (but nedit doesn't, because nedit uses the lesstif/Motif widget set).

PPS: I wrote to IBM (via the feedback form) to thank them for making this article available in HTML (or whatever it is -- XML?) instead of pdf.

Resources


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  • RandyKramer - 19 Apr 2002
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