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A widget toolkit, widget library, GUI toolkit, or UX library is a
library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vi ...
or a collection of libraries containing a set of
graphical control element A graphical widget (also graphical control element or control) in a graphical user interface is an element of interaction, such as a button or a scroll bar. Controls are software components that a computer user interacts with through dir ...
s (called ''widgets'') used to construct the
graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, ins ...
(GUI) of programs. Most widget toolkits additionally include their own
rendering engine Rendering or image synthesis is the process of generating a photorealistic or non-photorealistic image from a 2D or 3D model by means of a computer program. The resulting image is referred to as the render. Multiple models can be defined ...
. This engine can be specific to a certain
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
or
windowing system In computing, a windowing system (or window system) is software that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP ( windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm f ...
or contain back-ends to interface with more multiple ones and also with rendering APIs such as
OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...
,
OpenVG OpenVG is an API designed for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics. Its primary platforms are mobile phones, gaming & media consoles and consumer electronic devices. It was designed to help manufacturers create more attractive user interfac ...
, or EGL. The
look and feel In software design, the look and feel of a graphical user interface comprises aspects of its design, including elements such as colors, shapes, layout, and typefaces (the "look"), as well as the behavior of dynamic elements such as buttons, box ...
of the graphical control elements can be hard-coded or decoupled, allowing the graphical control elements to be themed/ skinned.


Overview

Some toolkits may be used from other languages by employing language bindings. Graphical user interface builders such as e.g. Glade Interface Designer facilitate the authoring of GUIs in a
WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...
manner employing a
user interface markup language A user interface markup language is a markup language that renders and describes graphical user interfaces and controls. Many of these markup languages are dialects of XML and are dependent upon a pre-existing scripting language engine, usually ...
such as in this case GtkBuilder. The GUI of a program is commonly constructed in a cascading manner, with graphical control elements being added directly to on top of one another. Most widget toolkits use event-driven programming as a model for interaction.Past, Present and Future of User Interface Software Tools
Brad Myers, Scott E. Hudson, Randy Pausch, Y Pausch. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2000

/ref> The toolkit handles Event handler, user events, for example when the user clicks on a button. When an event is detected, it is passed on to the application where it is dealt with. The design of those toolkits has been criticized for promoting an oversimplified model of event-action, leading programmers to create error-prone, difficult to extend and excessively complex
application code This glossary of computer software terms lists the general terms related to computer software, and related fields, as commonly used in Wikipedia articles. Glossary See also * Outline of computer programming The following ou ...
. Finite state machines and hierarchical state machines have been proposed as high-level models to represent the interactive state changes for reactive programs.


Windowing systems

A
window A window is an opening in a wall, door, roof, or vehicle that allows the exchange of light and may also allow the passage of sound and sometimes air. Modern windows are usually glazed or covered in some other transparent or translucent mat ...
is considered to be a graphical control element. In some windowing systems, windows are added directly to the scene graph (canvas) by the window manager, and can be stacked and layered on top of each other through various means. Each window is associated with a particular application which controls the widgets added to its canvas, which can be watched and modified by their associated applications.


See also

*
WIMP (computing) In human–computer interaction, WIMP stands for " windows, icons, menus, pointer", denoting a style of interaction using these elements of the user interface. Other expansions are sometimes used, such as substituting "mouse" and "mice" for m ...
*
Layout manager Layout managers are software components used in widget toolkits which have the ability to lay out graphical control elements by their relative positions without using distance units. It is often more natural to define component layouts in this mann ...
*
List of widget toolkits A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to: People * List (surname) Organizations * List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America * SC Germania List, German rugby union ...


References

{{X desktop environments and window managers Graphical user interfaces