Cross-platform Compatibility
FOX differentiates itself in the following way from other cross-platform toolkits:
- Tk is a cross-platform toolkit but does not have all of the widgets that FOX considers desirable.
- Qt had a different licensing model, which might have required a commercial license in some cases where FOX would not. (This is no longer the case starting with Qt 4.5.)
- wxWidgets promotes the use of native widgets on each supported platform.
- FLTK is a fast, low-footprint library that supports rapid application development, and requires less code to use, but lacks advanced widgets.
All of these toolkits have some support for programming natively on Mac OS and/or Mac OS X platforms, which FOX currently does not support.
FOX uses a technique similar to the Java Swing-style approach to display a graphical user interface to the screen, using only graphical primitives available on that platform, as opposed to the original Java AWT-style approach which used native widgets. This means that applications will have a similar look and feel across platforms. In theory, porting FOX to a new platform should also be easier than implementing support for native widgets.
On the downside, it usually means that FOX applications will look and feel different from native applications for those platforms, which some users may find confusing. Also, certain native platform features may not be available immediately, such as comprehensive printing support or internationalized input handling, because they will need to be re-implemented in a cross-platform way before they can be used in FOX.
Read more about this topic: Fox Toolkit