FLTK

External: index
Internal: |- preamble -|- downloads -|- end -|

Preamble

2010-05-25: This is some tests with FLTK - the Fast, Light, ToolKit. I had lightly experimented a few time before, but this time I sort to more understand how to use this toolkit... Choosing the VERSION to use takes some effort ;=)) At this time it comes in major versions 1, 2 and 3, but for some reason it seem the development of 2 and 3 seems halted, so I chose version 1. Version 1 has stable releases, at this time the last being 1.1.10, but I chose to go with the 1.3 SVN repository, as seemingly the most active at present.

The repository contents can be viewed at -
http://svn.easysw.com/public/fltk/fltk/branches/branch-1.3/
and the source downloaded with -
svn co http://svn.easysw.com/public/fltk/fltk/branches/branch-1.3/ fltk-1.3
but you should always check their site, in case this changes.


top

Building

With this source downloaded, the build with MSVC is relatively easy. I chose to use the MSVC8 solution files in directory ide/vc2005/fltk.sln, but I REMOVED the DLL build, and this forced me to remove some of the some 70 examples given.

In no time at all I had a set of STATIC libraries to use, in the lib directory - each is duplicated with the Debug version having a 'd' appended - fltk.lib fltkforms.lib fltkgl.lib fltkimages.lib fltkjpeg.lib fltkpng.lib fltkz.lib. It will be noted that FLTK has it own 'copy' of the jpeg, png and zlib sources.

And the fluid folder contained it GUI application builder - fluid.exe - and the test folder contained some 60+ sample applications, some built starting with a *.fl script file, which can be used like - fluid -c script.fl - to generate the cxx/h source.


top

Using FLUID

This GUI based script builder can be quite useful, but it takes some effort to understand and use.

 


top

Downloads

Take care downloading and running executables from the web!

Date Zip Size MD5
       
       

 


top

References

Of course, the FLTK main site has lots of 'reference' material, but often this needs to be filled in from other sources. Here is the URL for the documentation of Version 1.3 [http://www.fltk.org/doc-1.3/index.html]. And there is always the confusion of using search engines, like Yahoo!, since there is also some documentation for FLTK Version 2, and at this stage I do not know how different this is, so generally avoided it.

One that popped up most time was Erco's FLTK Cheat Page with lots of simple, good examples, but it seems not much on suing 'fluid'.


top

EOP

checked by Tidy  Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional