Talk:Widget toolkit

history" section, possibly
This page should have a "history" section, possibly with a timeline of all existing entries.

XUL ?
Should XUL be on here somewhere? http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/

Comparison
Perhaps there could be a comparison chart/table like other things? 165.230.46.139 20:36, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

I second that! I would like to see a simlar page for Comparison_of_C++_Widget_toolkits (like Comparison_of_VoIP_software).

For the table header, license, price, developer, still in developement, current version, windows, linux, mac, rad......

Wrong Link on See Also
There is a link here to "Comparison of widget engines" but that is completely unrelated. "Widget engines" are applet encapsulation programs as can be seen on its page. We should probably have a separate "Comparison of widget toolkits" for this page to link to. 71.195.221.204 21:48, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Control handles
What do you call the little boxes appearing on the corners and edges of a "selected control" that let you change the size and shape of the control? --Uncle Ed 20:04, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

I've heard them called "anchors" before, if you're asking about specific terminology. Otherwise I think "resizing handle" or something would be sufficiently descriptive. Ham Pastrami (talk) 10:14, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

In need of major attention **widget toolkit, widget engine**
There seems to be some inconsistency on how people define "widget toolkit" and "widget engine" (for example, what distinguishes a "high level widget toolkit" from a "widget engine")? dr.ef.tymac 17:23, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
 * The List of widget toolkits splits in two sections, one for "high-level widget toolkits", the other for low-level ones. Is this a reality, and if so, should it be documented here? --Jerome Potts (talk) 07:57, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
 * This is a rough explanation. A widget toolkit is essentially a code library for GUI developers, often in the form of source code or DLL. A widget engine, on the other hand, is a binary program, designed to be lightweight and providing some scripting functionality -- essentially a customizable mini-desktop. The difference between a low-level and high-level toolkit: A low-level kit is one that does not have a central model of interaction -- the programmer must poll the OS for input messages and decide what to do with them. For example a typical input message will tell you "user clicked the mouse at coordinates (x,y)". The programmer then has to figure out which widget is at coordinates (x,y), and if there is more than one possibility, he then has to determine the z-order as well. A high-level kit takes care of this automatically, by creating a generic widget superclass and deriving or wrapping each widget using that class. The uniform interface can then be exploited to treat all widgets in the same manner using a layout manager. The manager, which has access to all the relevant details of each widget, handles all the OS messages and abstracts them into events ("user clicked ok button"), making it much simpler to write the GUI logic. Ham Pastrami (talk) 09:54, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

list with usage of widget toolkits
I would like to create a list with widget toolkits + examples (applications which use them). This page or better a new one?

Title tidying
Sorry for cluttering up the history with all those minor edits, I kept seeing one more thing that needed fixed. :-) -- tiny plastic Grey Knight  ⊖  12:11, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: not moved, per lack of consensus —Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); March 17, 2011; 17:02 (UTC) 17:02, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Widget toolkit → Graphical user interface library toolkit — For consistency with other contents of, and to avoid use of jargon "widget" so it's more understandable to a general audience. Pnm (talk) 23:58, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Widget is widely used, and "Graphical user interface library" is longer. Why not only a redirect? Hervegirod (talk) 14:36, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
 * "Graphical user interface" is descriptive, and "widget" is ambiguous with software widget (see below). --Pnm (talk) 02:03, 20 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Oppose. The existing title is a common and concise name, and consistent with the names of the articles at widget engine, software widget and others, see also Category:Widget toolkits. Appropriate use of jargon is good. Disagree that the general audience would find the proposed title more understandable, so no reason to move. Andrewa (talk) 00:47, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
 * You might be illustrating my point. The related "widget" article is GUI widget – which includes things like checkboxes, text boxes, and scrollbars. A widget toolkit is a library for creating a graphical user interface by assembling these "widgets" (also called controls). By contrast, a software widget is a lightweight application. They run on widget engines like Microsoft Gadgets and Mac OS's Dashboard. Wikipedia categories are often named after the main articles, which is why I proposed the move here first. --Pnm (talk) 02:03, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
 * And I might not be. Agree that widget is a term with a number of different technical meanings in different contexts. Perhaps this is a bad thing, but it's not the job of Wikipedia to fix this. Andrewa (talk) 05:18, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
 * The first criterion in WP:TITLE is recognizability based on using the most common name. Widget toolkit isn't it. For these search engine test, I excluded references to Standard Widget Toolkit. It has quite a few results on its own, but doesn't figure into the way these libraries are described generically. Google News, last two years: widget toolkit 20, widget library 17, GUI toolkit 43, GUI library 5. In books: widget toolkit 312, widget library 513, GUI toolkit 1,640, GUI library 1,020. Web results: widget toolkit 230k, widget library 459k, GUI toolkit 982k GUI library 956k. There are some limitations: these certainly aren't all reliable sources, some pages about SWT probably use "widget toolkit" or one of the other phrases elsewhere in the page but aren't counted, some of the references (especially to "widget library") are about the other kind of widget. Despite their limitations, the searches demonstrate a clear tendency of "GUI __" over "widget __", and to a lesser degree, "GUI toolkit" over "GUI library". A lot of the "widget toolkit" results are for the names of individual toolkits – it certainly seems commonly included in the names of the toolkits, though not when describing them generically. Consistency with the other entries in shouldn't trump common usage of "toolkit", so I revised the proposal. Anecdotally, I can add I inadvertently duplicated  because I didn't recognize it – see  – and eventually found there already was a main article. Probably if I'd started with GUI toolkit I'd have found it quicker. --Pnm (talk) 19:28, 20 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment. In this case it's plausible that the wp:Commonname is GUI toolkit. I'd be extremely cautious with the number of results returned by Google, though. The same query "GUI toolkit", removing the -"standard widget toolkit" -wikipedia filters, returns only 162k for me, much less than the same query with the extra filters. Diego Moya (talk) 21:35, 20 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment: See also Talk:GUI widget. Andrewa (talk) 12:11, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Support: I agree widget is jargon. We should use a more encyclopedic name (graphical user interface) even if it is longer. –CWenger (talk) 03:34, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Actually it might need to be Graphical user interface control toolkit actually. Again, long but precise and encyclopedic. –CWenger (talk) 03:36, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.