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Information about Widget Toolkit

A widget toolkit, widget library, or GUI toolkit is a set of generic widgets for use in designing graphical user interfaces. Widgets that are part of a toolkit typically adhere to a unified design specification, including aesthetics and possibly an application framework to lend a sense of overall cohesion both for the program's designer and its users.

A widget toolkit API manages the creation and behavior of a graphical user interface:
  • The graphical user interface is often created as a tree of widgets, some of them supporting interaction with the user (labels, buttons, check box, ...), others being containers that group the other widgets (windows, panels, ...).
  • The content of the widgets tree, and the properties of the widgets, can often be modified at runtime (widgets can be added or removed from the tree).
  • The toolkit handles the user events, as for example when clicking on a button. The action following the detection of the event is not the responsibility of the toolkit, but of the application. For example, if the user selects a file in a file dialog, the file dialog widget behavior and the detection of the user event are managed by the widget toolkit, but the actual action to perform on the file after selection must be performed by the application.
Widget toolkits must have a means to position the widgets in their containers. The simplest way to define their positions is by defining their absolute (on the screen) or relative (to the parent) position in pixels or common distance units, but it is also often possible to lay out the widgets by setting their relative positions without using distance units (see layout manager).

Also, the look and feel of the widgets can be hardcoded in the toolkit, but some widget toolkit APIs decouple the look and feel from the definition of the widgets, allowing the developer to define them at the initialisation of the application or even at runtime (see pluggable look and feel).

See also

widget (or control) is an interface element that a computer user interacts with, such as a window or a text box. Widgets are sometimes qualified as virtual to distinguish them from their physical counterparts, e.g.
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graphical user interface (GUI) is a type of user interface which allows people to interact with a computer and computer-controlled devices which employ graphical icons, visual indicators or special graphical elements called "widgets", along with text, labels or text
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In computer programming, an application framework is a software framework that is used to implement the standard structure of an application for a specific operating system.
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An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that an operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by computer programs.
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graphical user interface (GUI) is a type of user interface which allows people to interact with a computer and computer-controlled devices which employ graphical icons, visual indicators or special graphical elements called "widgets", along with text, labels or text
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graphical user interface (GUI) is a type of user interface which allows people to interact with a computer and computer-controlled devices which employ graphical icons, visual indicators or special graphical elements called "widgets", along with text, labels or text
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tree is a widely-used data structure that emulates a tree structure with a set of linked nodes.

Nodes

A node may contain a value or a condition or represents a separate data structure or a tree of its own.
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widget (or control) is an interface element that a computer user interacts with, such as a window or a text box. Widgets are sometimes qualified as virtual to distinguish them from their physical counterparts, e.g.
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button (sometimes known as a command button or push button) is a widget that provides the user a simple way to trigger an event, like searching for a query at a search engine, or to interact with dialog boxes, like confirming his actions.
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In computing, a check box (checkbox, tickbox, or tick box) is a graphical user interface element (widget) that permits the user to make multiple selections from a number of options.
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In computer science, a container is a class, a data structure, or an abstract data type (ADT) whose instances are collections of other objects. They are used to store objects in an organized way following specific access rules.
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window is a visual area, usually rectangular in shape, containing some kind of user interface, displaying the output of and allowing input for one of a number of simultaneously running computer processes.
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In graphical computer software a panel is :
  • A widget commonly packaged as part of a Widget toolkit for a graphical user interface. See toolbar and dialog box
  • A folder in some graphical operating system interfaces that provide tools for configuring the system and the

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In computer programming, an event handler is an asynchronous callback subroutine that handles inputs received in a program. Each event is a piece of application-level information from the underlying framework, typically the GUI toolkit.
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button (sometimes known as a command button or push button) is a widget that provides the user a simple way to trigger an event, like searching for a query at a search engine, or to interact with dialog boxes, like confirming his actions.
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Application software is a subclass of computer software that employs the capabilities of a computer directly and thoroughly to a task that the user wishes to perform. This should be contrasted with system software which is involved in integrating a computer's various capabilities,
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computer file is a block of arbitrary information, or resource for storing information, which is available to a computer program and is usually based on some kind of durable storage.
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In computing, a file dialog (also called File Selector/Chooser, or open and save dialog) is a dialog box that allows users to choose a file from the file system. File dialogs differ from file managers as they are not intended for file management (although some offer simple
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widget (or control) is an interface element that a computer user interacts with, such as a window or a text box. Widgets are sometimes qualified as virtual to distinguish them from their physical counterparts, e.g.
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In computer science, a container is a class, a data structure, or an abstract data type (ADT) whose instances are collections of other objects. They are used to store objects in an organized way following specific access rules.
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pixel (short for picture element, using the common abbreviation "pix" for "pictures") is a single point in a graphic image. Each such information element is not really a dot, nor a square, but an abstract sample.
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Layout managers, used in Widget toolkits, are software components which have the ability to lay out widgets by their relative positions without using distance units.
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Look and feel is a term used in descriptions of products and fields such as marketing, branding and trademarking, to signify the experience a person has using a product, and the main features of its appearance and interfaces.
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Pluggable look and feel is a mechanism used in some Widget toolkits allowing to change the look and feel of a graphical user interface at runtime.

The most well-known of such Widget toolkits is the Swing widget toolkit that is part of the Java API.
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A graphical user interface builder, or GUI builder, is a software development tool that simplifies the creation of GUIs by allowing the designer to arrange widgets using a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor.
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Low-level widget toolkits

Integrated in the operating system

  • * The Mac OS toolbox, or Macintosh APIs, formerly located in ROM, but in "new world" Macs, on disk. A cleaned up version for Mac OS X is called Carbon.

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