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Xforms Toolkit

xforms-toolkit.org

81 pointsmarcodiego18 comments

Reminds me of fltk: https://www.fltk.org

I also feel that GUI toolkits should try to have dynamic layouts, so layouts can be adjusted without the need for re-compiling and re-linking. Though I understand historically, for the desire of a single file executable.

wxWidgets has XML layouts, a bit rough, though: https://docs.wxwidgets.org/3.0/overview_xrc.html

I'd be interested to know what do you find rough about XRC (as wx XML layout system is known)?

I was reminded of the lesser-known FOX Toolkit for X11 and Windows: http://fox-toolkit.org/

Curiously the second time I've mentioned it on HN today.

I believe fltk was originally intended to mimic the API and widgets of xforms.

https://www.fltk.org/articles.php?L363:

> FLTK was originally designed to be compatible with the Forms Library written for SGI machines. In that library all the functions and structures started with "fl_". This naming was extended to all new methods and widgets in the C++ library, and this prefix was taken as the name of the library. It is almost impossible to search for "FL" on the Internet, due to the fact that it is also the abbreviation for Florida. After much debating and searching for a new name for the toolkit, which was already in use by several people, Bill came up with "FLTK", and even a bogus excuse that it stands for "The Fast Light Tool Kit".

I think it still has the astounding multitude of bevels and frames that XForms has. Just like you could spot Tk apps by the bisque color, you could spot XForms by programmers putting all the frames into one single dialog window.

I really liked fltk. Only annoyance was that fluid (the fltk ide-of-sorts) had esc be cancel in the code editor dialog; I use vi most of the time. With fluid, muscle memory obliterated a lot of code

> I also feel that GUI toolkits should try to have dynamic layouts, so layouts can be adjusted without the need for re-compiling and re-linking.

Isn't that literally every desktop UI toolkit since 1982 ?

Some have resizing and scaling for free (e.g. AWT, most HTML renderers) while others do not (e.g. VB, as much as I love it)

A blast from the past. I used so many applications based on it back in the day. Xfce, CDE and XForms FTW.

> The project started in 1997 when Olivier Fourdan decided that he wanted a desktop on Linux that resembled the CDE-based HP machines he used at work. Using XForms, a popular X toolkit at the time, he wrote a CDE-like panel to use with fvwm. With obvious ambitions to grow the tool, he called it XFCE: XForms Common Environment. Within a year, he added a window manager based on fvwm to create XFCE 2.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/182497/

Of course, it has a form designer: http://xforms-toolkit.org/doc/xforms_11.html#Part-II-Getting...

Home page, http://xforms-toolkit.org/

Ultimate++ has a RAD tool for GUI development. Tutorial is here: https://www.ultimatepp.org/srcdoc$CtrlLib$Tutorial$en-us.htm...

I have used XForms in the early 2000s to build audit solutions with it. I think it worked really well :)

I think early version of XFCE was using this toolkit. Then they used GTK and the project became Xfce.

Last stable release is from 2014/06/28

There is a newer pre-release, and there are much more recent commits:

https://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/xforms/ https://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/xforms.git/log/

They look fantastic! Clean, functional.

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