Welcome To FOX!
our motto:
Write Once, Compile Anywhere
Last update: 1/5/99
What Is FOX?
FOX is a C++ based Toolkit for developing Graphical User Interfaces easily and effectively. It offers a wide, and growing, collection of Controls, and provides state of the art facilities such as drag and drop, selection, as well as OpenGL widgets for 3D graphical manipulation. FOX also implements icons, images, and user-convenience features such as status line help, and tooltips. Tooltips may even be used for 3D objects!
Considerable importance has been placed on making FOX one of the fastest toolkits around, and to minimize memory use:- FOX uses a number of techniques to speed up drawing and spatial layout of the GUI. Memory is conserved by allowing programmers to create and destroy GUI elements on the fly.
Even though FOX offers a large collection of Controls already, FOX leverages C++ to allow programmers to easily build additional Controls and GUI elements, simply by taking existing controls, and creating a derived class which simply adds or redefines the desired behavior.
One of the prime design goals of FOX is the ease of programming; thus, most controls can be created using a single line of C++ code; most parameters have sensible default values, so that they may be omitted, and layout managers ensure that designers of GUI's do not have to worry about precise alignments.
Another nice feature of FOX which significantly reduces the number of lines of code which have to be written is FOX's ability to have widgets connect to each other, and passing certain commands between them; for example, a menu entry Hide Toolbar can be directly connected to the Toolbar, and cause it to hide.
Finally, FOX makes it easy to maintain the state of the GUI in an application
by having the GUI elements automatically updating themselves by interrogating
the application's state. This feature eliminates the large amount
of effort that may go into sensitizing, graying out, checking/unchecking
etc. depending on the application state.
Where to get it?
You can FTP the complete FOX
GUI toolkit from our FTP site: ftp://cyberia.cfdrc.com.
The tar-ball includes this on-line documentation you see here.
Mailing List.
To stay informed, we now have a mailing list for FOX. To
subscribe, send mail to fox-users-request@cfdrc.com
with
the word subscribe in the message body.
Messages to the list can be sent to fox-users@cfdrc.com.
FOX announcements will be made through this list also.
Screen Shots & 3rd Party FOX Applications.
This picture shows FOX being used in a PC board design application. It highlights the use of the FXTreeList widget (on the left), the FXShutter widget (on the right) and the OpenGL FXGLViewer widgets, as well as the Multiple Document Interface Widgets (center). This other picture shows the text editor application in the process of opening another file.The FOX PathFinder, a File Explorer program being developed using FOX, is shown here.
Magic Light is a FOX-based GUI for a ray-tracing program being developed my Mikael Aronsson. Another FOX application being developed by Davin S. Hills is a RedHat Package (RPM) viewer and manipulation program; download it from his site.
Did you write a cool FOX application? If so, please mail
me and I'll gladly link to your site from the FOX pages.
Support for OpenGL and Mesa.
The FOX Library provides convenient Widgets for OpenGL
and Mesa,
The FXGLCanvas Widget provides a very basic 3D drawable, while the FXGLViewer
provides a 3D viewer complete with essential camera operations such as
rotation, zooming, etc.
For more about OpenGL, click on the logo below:
More information about the GL Widgets is contained in the documentation.
FOX is Platform Independence!
The Windows NT port of FOX is making very rapid progress. Before sending me any nasty comments, please read this more detailed explanation of the reasons. Other platforms such as LINUX GGI may be in our future as well.
For example, here is the FOX textedit
sample application running under Windows NT. And here
is the same application running on a Silicon
Graphics Octane system.
Table of Contents.
What FOX is, why it was written, and what are its main features. | |
A quick introduction to programming with FOX, and an overview of the concepts used in FOX development. | |
How FOX notifies applications about the users actions, mouse clicks and state changes through messages sent to a target. | |
FOX automatically updates the application's controls through the use of messages send during the GUI Update Phase. This section explains how to use this feature and | |
Timers and Chores
|
How to use the FOX timer facility to perform some task at an appointed time, and how to use chores to execute background tasks during idle processing. |
The
FXWindow Class
|
The basic FXWindow class, which is the basis of all FOX controls is explained in more detail. |
The FOX Layout Managers provide a convenient way of arranging your GUI Widgets without the need for explicit specification of coordinates and dimensions. | |
Keyboard Focus
|
How the keyboard focus is moved around from one widget to another, and what is the effect of this. |
Enrich your applications with icons. With FOX's built-in icon and image classes, this becomes very easy. | |
Help and Tool Tips
|
Status line help and Tooltips are a nice way of allowing users to learn about a program without consulting oracles to devine the meaning of an icon-button. |
The FOX Registry | The FOX Registry database provides a facility to manage persistent settings for configuration information in your program. |
Drag and drop are part and parcel of any modern GUI driven application. FOX provides a number of convenient hooks to allow you to move data between different Widgets, and even between different applications running on different hosts. | |
Using the OpenGL Viewer | FOX provides a convenient way to start with 3D OpenGL programming. The GLCanvas widget provides a basic 3D drawing surface. The GLViewer widget provides a complete camera model and interactive manipulation capability, including 3D picking, dragging, and Tooltips. |
FOX provides serialization of both data and objects in a machine-independent, portable manner, by means of its built-in Stream classes. | |
FOX is designed to make it easy to build new widgets. As FOX is completely implemented in C++, you can use common C++ derivation to create new Widgets from existing ones. |
Sponsor.
The FOX project owes a debt of gratitude to CFD
Research Corp., which has allowed me to develop this library under
LGPL, supplied hosting and moreover has allowed substantial contributions
made by other CFDRC employees to be incorporated into the library.
Please take a minute to visit the main CFD Reseach web page.