WINGs
Is
Not
GNU
step
While GNUstep is our ideal development framework, it's overkill for a
window manager like Window Maker. We had a need for a quick,
lightweight toolkit to handle basic window manager tasks, which is
how WINGs was born, and why it has become an integral part of Window
Maker's core.
Unlike the general uses of the GNUstep development environment, the WINGs toolkit was
designed as a specific solution for Window Maker. It is not implemented in an
object-oriented language, but was designed with OO schemas in mind. It is
encapsulated in objects that have various methods (functions), which in turn can be
accessed like real objects (i.e it's unknown what they contain, and they only have
the interface functions to alter their data). As much as C will allow, that is.
What really matters is that it's functional and small enough for our purposes.
Surprisingly, there have been several developers who think WINGs is mature and
functional enough to write full fledged applications with it. For developers who
are interested in creating real applications, we would encourage them to
look at GNUstep instead. GNUstep is written in Objective-C, and anyone with
a solid C++ background shouldn't need more than an hour to begin programming in
Objective-C. For more information on this, please visit the
GNUstep Resource
section.
So, what does WINGs do for us, specifically? It contains many necessary widgets,
such as the buttons, file browser, color chooser, and text editor dialog
that are all used for creating the UI. It is currently missing a few important
items, such as DnD, treeview, and application menus, but those will be integrated
in future releases.
One of the more important aspects of WINGs is that it now provides proplist
functionality. proplist, short for "property list", is what Window Maker uses to
generate and maintain structured configuration files. This data is stored as
plain ASCII text under a user's ~/GNUstep directory. These files are what make
up the menus, the current state and appearance of the desktop, the Dock, the Clip, and
the values set in WPrefs.
As an example, here is a short snippet from the proplist version of the default
menu:
(
Applications,
(
Info,
("Info Panel", INFO_PANEL),
(Legal, LEGAL_PANEL),
("System Console", EXEC, xconsole),
("System Load", SHEXEC, "xosview || xload"),
("Process List", EXEC, "xterm -e top"),
("Manual Browser", EXEC, xman)
),
(Run..., EXEC, "%a(Run,Type command to run:)"),
...
)
As this section evolves, we will be providing more documentation on the internals
of WINGs. For the time being, developers interested in WINGs should see Alexey Voinov's WINGsman documentation project. We'll also try to cover some examples and/or tutorials on how to program
small applications in WINGs in the near future. For anyone already using WINGs for a project, please
contact us, as we'd
like to get an idea of its popularity and practical uses, as well as some
additional material to place here.
know it
