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We've been looking at adding decent browser support to our C++ application; this question is about GUI-independent browser libraries since our project involves 3D rendering and doesn't quite fit a normal GUI.
The two I've seen so far are Berkelium and Awesomium. Both seem to work in a similar way from my quick investigation, rendering to an offscreen-buffer which you blt into your own window/game/anything. Awesomium is proprietary and costs a fair amount ($5k), Berkelium is open-source and free. Has anyone compared these (and other) such tools? Cross-platform is a benefit but not 100% essential.
Take a look at the Chromium Embedded Framework. CEF 3 supports off-screen rendering on all operating systems: Windows/Mac/Linux.
Disclaimer: I created Awesomium. Nevertheless, I will practice the utmost objectivity in my response.
Awesomium does cost a bit of money but it is definitely the best tool for the job, I'll defend my reasons with a bulleted list:
Simple, well-documented API; we've tried our best to keep the API as intuitive and readable as possible. That's really important when you're embedded something as large and complex as an entire browser framework. (Believe me, you don't want to embed WebKit directly-- that's like swallowing the sun.)
Windowless rendering; the library was designed from the outset to be used outside of a standard "windowing framework". We make it really easy to render a WebView to a texture:
void update()
{
if(webView->isDirty())
webView->render()->copyTo(texture, width * bpp, bpp, false);
}
Solid Javascript integration; if you use Awesomium as an HTML GUI renderer for your 3D game, you'll definitely want to take advantage of our Javascript <-> C++ integration. You can call Javascript functions directly from C++ and vice-versa, set callbacks, expose global properties, and more. I wrote up a big guide on my blog here.
Well-supported; we use the money we get from our top-tier commercial licenses to fund support and development of the library. If you need help, please visit http://support.awesomium.com and we'll be glad to lend a hand.
The library is free for non-commercial use and very affordable for indie developers. If you'd like to use Awesomium in your next project and are worried about the price-point, please email me at adam#khrona.com and I'll see if I can't help you out. :-)
Berkelium is really painless to use. I integrated it into my game in 6 days, you can read all about it (and some other options) here: http://www.onemanmmo.com/index.php?cmd=newsitem&comment=news.1.31.0
The only downside is no debug build and 40MB of binaries.
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Is it possible to develop a C++ program while using HTML and CSS for the user interface? I know about programming with Javascript using a Webkit container, but I am really interested in C++ development.
I felt in love with C# WPF when I developed under Windows, but now I moved to Linux and I haven't found a good tool for using markup for interfaces. For this, I would like to mix HTML and CSS, which are very lightweight and easy to use, with C++ code, with something like WPF.
Oh, one more thing: I'm looking for desktop development, not web.
Yes, it is possible. What you want is a C++ web framework. You could start by looking at CppCMS—a Free High Performance Web Development Framework (not a CMS) aimed for Rapid Web Application Development.
Edit: After the question has been clarified, I think Awesomium would be a good fit for your needs.
You can achieve the same functionality by embedding WebKit (or Gecko) but as far as I know that is exactly what Awesomium does behind the scenes.
An alternative is librocket—a C++ interface middleware package designed for game applications. As you can guess from the description it is a good fit for games or real-time applications.
Sciter is exactly that - embeddable HTML/CSS engine with C/C++ API. Compact and multi-platform.
And check this article.
Sciter has the same feature set as WPF but uses HTML/CSS instead of XAML and uses native API.
Features out of the box:
HTML, CSS, SVG, aPNG (animated PNGs), image sprites,
<plaintext> - editor with syntax highlighting,
<htmlarea> - WYSIWYG HTML editor,
<frame type=pager> - print preview and HTML/CSS print,
animations,
HTTP client, REST/JSON client, WebSocket's, DataSockets,
etc.
The same application with Sciter UI running on Windows, MacOS and Linux from the same sources:
Disclaimer: I am an author of Sciter Engine.
2021 update: you can also use Sciter.JS that is version of Sciter that uses standard JavaScript (ES2020) script engine.
I think Electron would be a nice addition to the other answers.
It uses NodeJS to run a Webkit Window. Electron itself is only html/css/js, but you can use any Node Module within your Electron App - including custom, natively compiled C++ code. A possible Module to embed your C++ code would be node-gyp.
Be aware, however, that this workflow may include a little bit more JS than you would have with the other answers.
My favourite text editor, Atom, was made with Electron.
You can use Chromium Embedded Framework to embed HTML5 content in your app.
You'll get might and speed of Chromium and ability to build GUI apps the same way you develop web applications.
I suggest checking out Ultralight HTML UI Engine
Not Open Source, Available for C++. OpenGL and DirectX rendering supported.
Ultralight is the lighter, faster option to integrate HTML UI in your
C++ app.
It's made by the creator of Awesomium, who unfortunately decided to delete Awesomium.
If you need something more heavy weight I recommend taking a look at CEF. It’s a very powerful (and open source) tool.
I would suggest RmlUI
Its an active fork of librocket with more features. Its very modular, you can handle rendering, event handling and user input yourself (or copy one from provided examples).
Note: RmlUI doesn't support full HTML5/CSS3 specifications, but only a subset of it. Animations are supported tho.
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I have an unfinished MathML rendering library written in C++. I ceased development a few months ago due to lack of time. The library [still] uses the TrueType version (unsupported) of the STIX fonts beta [version 1.0 of the STIX fonts (OpenType Postscript format) has since been released].
Development of this kind of library is a HUGE undertaking and, in fact, requires a number of programmers/developers. In my case, I am doing it alone, and here's my question:
Does anyone of you know of any foundations/philanthropists who may be interested to fund my project in return for open sourcing the code?
The funding will serve as an incentive for me to finish the library - perhaps by taking a sabbatical :p - and, of course, as 'payment' for the intellectual property involved.
I've searched the web, contacted some [e.g., foundations, VCs, angels, etc.], but I either did not get a response (from VCs and angels) or was rejected (one reason is geography since these foundations support only US-based projects).
As an aside, when I search the web for MathML, the results are often outdated. I guess there's not much activity concerning MathML. Yet, I believe this library will be very useful not only to developers but also to anyone who uses math, especially students and teachers. It is useful for e-learning, can be used with desktop apps and web servers (Windows), makes it easy to insert images of formulas in PowerPoint documents, etc.
Any suggestions are most welcome. Thank you.
EDITS: I have finished this library finally without funding, although I don't rule out seeking one.
You can find my new site below with lots of sample formulas; click on the download link to download the SDK.
http://reformath.webnode.com/ (preferred for statistical reason)
http://reformath.weebly.com/ (please use the above link instead)
DON'T forget to provide some feedback - or donations. Thanks!!!!!
Since we've already got open source MathML (Firefox has had it for years) that mean you'd have to do something better than the existing OSS solutions. And at that point, why not work on an existing open source project?
So that leaves commercial apps that may want a closed library for MathML rendering. I would go after companies like the makers of MathCad, Matlab, or any other engineering software that may want to display equations neatly. You should have something that already works for some subset of the things you/they will want it to do. You should also turn yourself into a company before going to those places so they take you seriously and you can license it to multiple customers. Otherwise the most you're likely to get is a job offer where they'd like you to hand over what you've got (for free if they can get you to) and then work on it as an employee - which may be all you want if you love it and hate your day job ;-)
You should probably ask on www-math list, also if you ask there, we can list your application in the software implementations page
http://www.w3.org/Math/Software/
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There are tons of GUI libraries for C/C++, but very few of them are based on the idea that opengl is a rather multiplatform graphics library. Is there any big disadvantage on using this OpenGL for building my own minimal GUI in a portable application?
Blender is doing that, and it seems that it works well for it.
EDIT: The point of my question is not about using an external library or making my own. My main concern is about the use of libraries that use opengl as backend. Agar, CEGUI or Blender's GUI for instance.
Thanks.
Here's an oddball one that bit a large physics experiment I worked on: because an OpenGL GUI bypasses some of the usual graphics abstraction layers, it may defeat remote viewing applications.
In the particular instance I'm thinking of we wanted to allow remote shift operations over VNC. Everything worked fine except for the one program (which we only needed about once per hour, but we really needed) that used an OpenGL interface. We had to delay until a remote version of the OpenGL interface could be prepared.
You're losing the native platforms capabilities for accessibility. For example on Windows most controls provide information to screen readers or other tools supporting accessibility impaired users.
Basically unless you have a real reason to do this, you shouldn't.
Re-inventing the Wheel: Yeah, you'd be doing it. But I note OP used the word "minimal" in the problem statement, so assuming it really doesn't need to scale up to all that, it may be a small enough wheel as to not matter. The product I currently work on supports OpenGL on three platforms (Win, Mac, Linux) and we built all our own widgets (text boxes, buttons, dialogs). It's a lot of work but now that we've done it we own a huge chunk of our stack and don't have to debug into third party frameworks when things don't work as expected. It's nice having complete control of the experience. There's always something you want to do that a framework doesn't support. Like everything in our business, it is a trade-off and you just have to weigh your needs against your need to finish on time.
Portability: Yes, you will still have to write platform specific code to boot-strap everything. This will be difficult if you've not done it before as it requires you to understand all the target platforms.
Windows Drivers: We've found that graphics card manufacturers have much better support for DirectX on Windows than OpenGL, since that's what is required to get MSFT certification. Often low- to mid-range cards have bugs, missing functionality, or outright crashes in their OpenGL support.
With Qt 4.5 you can select if you want to use OpenGL as window renderer.
More info:
https://www.qt.io/blog/2008/10/22/so-long-and-thanks-for-the-blit
Read the comments to know about the problems about this.
The obvious one is that you're basically building the GUI elements yourself, instead of having a nice designed like for wxWidgets or Qt.
You cant just use opengl, you need a platform specific code to set up a window for opengl.
From the freely available opengl red book:
OpenGL is designed as a streamlined,
hardware-independent interface to be
implemented on many different hardware
platforms. To achieve these qualities,
no commands for performing windowing
tasks or obtaining user input are
included in OpenGL; instead, you must
work through whatever windowing system
controls the particular hardware
you're using.
There are multiplatform solutions for this like glut, qt, wxWidgets, ...
And if you have to use them anyway, why not use built in GUI elements. They also give you the opportunity to build your own, and make use of the framework to handle mouse/keyboard events and stuff.
If you want a GUI as in windows/button etc. Don't do it yourself. There a lot of free solutions for this, wxwidgets,qt or GTK. All have OpenGL support if you want a 3d window
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Could someone recommend any good resources for creating Graphics User Interfaces, preferably in C/C++?
Currently my biggest influence is 3DBuzz.com's C++/OpenGL VTMs (Video Training Modules). While they are very good, they cover a large area of graphics programming, so only skim the surface of GUI programming.
This question does relate to "How do I make a GUI?", where there is also a rough outline of my current structure.
Any response would be appreciated.
Edit:
I've just read some of the answers and spotted that I've missed some points. I had to type the question twice as I caught the wrong button and lost it.
I missed two important points, first: This will be used cross platform including homebrew on a Sony PSP. Second: I want to create a GUI system not use an existing one.
Edit 2: I think some of you are missing the point, I don't what to use an existing GUI system I want to build one.
Qt in it's current form is not portable to the PSP, never mind the overkill of such a task.
That said I've decided to create an IM-GUI, and have started to prototype the code.
I wouldn't use OpenGL for the GUI unless you are planning for hardware accelerated and/or 3D effects that you don't think you would get with a more traditional GUI toolkit (e.g Qt, wxWidgets, GTK, etc). If you just need a quick simple GUI for hosting your OpenGL graphics then FLTK is a nice choice. Otherwise, for rendering the GUI directly in OpenGL their are libraries like Crazy Eddie's GUI that do just that and provide lots of skinnable widgets that you won't have to reinvent. The window and OpenGL context could then be provide with a portable library like SDL.
EDIT: Now that I've gone back and taken at look your other post I think I have a better understanding of what you are asking. For a GUI on an embedded system like the Nintendo DS, I would consider using an "immediate mode" GUI. Jari Komppa has a good tutorial about them, but you could use a more object-oriented approach with C++ than the C code he presents.
http://www.fox-toolkit.org has an API reference, if you're looking how to work with a specific framework. Or were you more interested in general theory or something more along the lines of how to do the low-level stuff yourself?
For more information about "immediate mode" GUI, I can recommend the Molly Rocket forums. There's a good video presentation of the thinking behind IM-GUI, along with lots of discussion.
I recently hacked together a very quick IM-GUI system based on presentation on Jari's page, and in my case, where I really just wanted to be able to get a couple of buttons and boxes on the screen, and more or less just hard code the response to the inputs, it really felt like the right thing to do, instead of going for a more full blown GUI-architecture. (This was in a DirectX-application, so the number of choices I had was pretty limited).
One of the fastest ways is to use python with a gui binding like pyQt, PyFLTK, tkinter, wxPython or even via pygame which uses SDL.
Its easy fast and platform independent.
Also the management of the packages is unbeatable.
See:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyQt
http://www.fltk.org/
(tkinter is default and already packaged with python)
http://wxpython.org/
http://www.pygame.org/news.html
For a platform like the PSP, I'd worry slightly about the performance of an IM GUI solution. With a traditional retained mode type of solution, when you create a control, you can also create the vertex buffer/display list or what-have-you required to render it. With an immediate mode solution, it seems to me that you'd need to recreate this dynamically each frame.
You might not care about this, if you're only doing a few buttons, or it's not going to be used in-game (assuming you're making a game) but, especially if you have a fair bit of text, the cost of rendering might start to hurt if you can't find a way to cache the display lists somehow.
Have a look at Qt. It is an open source library for making GUI's. Unlike Swing in Java, it assumes a lot of stuff, so it is really easy to make functional GUI's. For example, a textarea assumes that you want a context menu when you right click it with copy, paste, select all, etc. The documentation is also very good.
I'll second Qt. It's cross platform, and I found it much easier to work with than the built in Visual Studio GUI stuff. It's dual-licensed, so if you don't want your code to be GPL you could purchase a license instead.
I've had a look at the Video from Molley Rocket and Looked through Jari Komppa's cached tutorials.
An IM-GUI seems the best way to go, I think it will be a lot more streamlined, and lot quicker to build than the system I originally had in mind.
Now a new issue, I can only except one Answer. :(
Thanks again to Monjardin and dooz, cheers.
thing2k
I'd have a look at GLAM and GLGooey
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Basically I want tools which generate source code visualization like:
function call graph
dependency graph
...
Doxygen is really excellent for this, although you will need to install GraphViz to get the the graphs to draw.
Once you've got everything installed, it's really rather simple to draw the graphs. Make sure you set EXTRACT_ALL and CALL_GRAPH to true and you should be good to go.
The full documentation on this function for doxygen is here.
I strongly recommend BOUML. It's a free UML modelling application, which:
is extremely fast (fastest UML tool ever created, check out benchmarks),
has rock solid C++ import support,
has great SVG export support, which is important, because viewing large graphs in vector format, which scales fast in e.g. Firefox, is very convenient (you can quickly switch between "birds eye" view and class detail view),
is full featured, impressively intensively developed (look at development history, it's hard to believe that so fast progress is possible).
So: import your code into BOUML and view it there, or export to SVG and view it in Firefox.
For the free version:
source is on Github as DoUML
Installers can be downloaded from http://www.bouml.fr/download.html
You can look at different tools for software design and modelling (Rational Rose, Sparx Enterprise Architect, Umbrello, etc). Majority of them have some functionality to reverse modeling by source code, and getting UML class diagrams, and sometimes even sequence diagrams (and this is very close to functions call graph).
But after you get some pictures on really big project code base you could realise that such graphs are rather hard to read and understand. Unfortunally visualization capabilities of complexity are very limited.
As for me, using a "divide and rule" idiom is more convinient approach. You can extract different functionality blocks or layers from your some code base (just sorting cpp-files by different folders sometimes enough). Another way is to use some scripts (bash, python) to create simple csv tables with interested parameters of files, classes or functions like "number of dependencies" etc).
If you use Visual Studio, the 2010 Ultimate release lets you generate sequence diagrams and dependency graphs. However, the release currently supports only .NET application projects.
The team has gotten lots of interest in supporting C++ in a future release, so you might want stay tuned. In the meantime, you can post in the VS 2010 Architectural Discovery & Modeling Tools forum at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsarch/threads to request an update. I know the product team loves hearing customer feedback about the tools.
In the meantime, you can learn more about creating sequence diagrams and dependency diagrams from .NET code in the following topics:
How to: Find Code Using Architecture Explorer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409431%28VS.100%29.aspx
How to: Generate Graph Documents from Code: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409453%28VS.100%29.aspx#SeeSpecificSource
How to: Explore Code with Sequence Diagrams: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee317485%28VS.100%29.aspx
To try the RC release and provide feedback, download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=457bab91-5eb2-4b36-b0f4-d6f34683c62a
Try doxygen
Example output from Xerces
In addition to written tools above, you may try understand. But, it is not free.
Might be a duplication, but check out ollydbg, IDA Pro and this website has a whole bunch of resources with some very sexy images.