ANNOUNCE: FLTK for Tcl/Tk Version 0.3
Iain B. Findleton
The Fast Light Tool Kit is a cross-platform GUI development environment for Window/Mac/UNIX and a range of other platforms. It has the advantage of using a platform native interface to its implementation platform, and is based on a minimalist philosophy as to its window manager interface. The result is a consistent look and feel across all platforms, and performance at the level of the native implementaion's capabilities.
The Tcl bindings for the Fast Light Tool Kit are implemented as a STUBS
based dynamically loadable extension that works with Tcl/Tk releases after
8.1 The bindings support a large widget set that will optionally render
in either OpenGL or the default, windows-like appearance. Most widgets
support convenience features such as:
- Automatic scroll bar management
- Tooltips
- Image support for BMP,GIF,TIFF,JPEG and PNG along with XPM and XBM and others
- Tcl variable binding for both value and state as well as scripts
- All the usual types of configurable widget parameters
I have been using this extension for real workd work for about 8
months now and I have the general impression that its features and "light"
approach reduce the amount of Tcl code needed to generate an application
considerably. While not as rich as is Tk in configurable options, the package
is somewhat faster, especially under Windows.
The current release is quite stable and is available in binary form for Linux RH7 and Windows. The Windows release has been built using the MINGW cross compiler, entirely without problems from the Linux source tree. Binary releases are built using static libraries for FLTK, so they should work out of the box.
There is a source distribution, but it is not pretty.
-- Iain B. Findleton http://pages.infinit.net/cclients (514)457-0744 The motto "Honi soit qui mal y pense" is found frequently on devices of death and distruction! The motto "E pluribus unum" is found on an item that strongly distinguishes those that have it from those who don't!