Come play in our sandbox!

A major difficulty for many developers in creating cross-platform GUI applications is to create buttons, edit boxes, lists, HTML viewer and other such widgets in a way that can be compiled and reused on different operating systems (such as MS-Windows Vista, Mac OS/X and Linux). The simplest choice is usually to choose an existing interface library, but that can be problematic and limiting. For instance, using the common Microsoft Foundation Classes, you can only target Microsoft platforms, which defeats the whole purpose of cross-platform software development.

Made to Order Software developed a custom solution using an open-source, vendor-agnostic approach. We developed on Gtk/gtkmm because it provides a pleasing UI experience, and its license allows use in proprietary applications. However, since you cannot depend on the libraries already being present on the target system, to say nothing of a guarantee that they would even be binary compatible, we developed the sandbox. It contains all of the libraries right in the software, giving each target system the libraries required to link against. the sandbox installs these libraries right with the application installer!

gtkmm

This GUI framework library is a fully object-oriented framework developed against the most recent C++ standard. It uses libsigc++ to implement a signal/slot architecture. It fully wraps and abstracts the whole Gtk+-2.0 interface, allowing the developer to create GUI widgets in a C++ way.

In short, gtkmm is a well-designed, well-engineered, fully object-oriented GUI framework that is a widely-used, stable, cross-platform that is also quite pleasing to the eye.

motk

Made to Order Software provides, along with molib, a library called motk that provides C++ classes that extend the gtkmm and other libraries included in the sandbox.

sswf

The sswf library is part of the sandbox. This library lets you create Flash animations on the fly. It was created in 2002 and supports nearly all the features of Flash version 8.0. And best of all, Made to Order Software offers full support for this library.

Embedded HTML in your Application

We include the Gtk+ WebCore libraries that allow HTML rendering. When you use the motk library in concert with the sandbox, you have access to a C++ wrapper that provides easy display of HTML text, embedded right in your application. Common uses are to offer online help to your users, or as instant access to your website. You can also use the included libssh2 to create a secure connection to your corporate servers, allowing your customers the ability to download proprietary content.

OpenGL Using GtkGLextmm and libx3d

Use GtkGLextmm to create OpenGL windows and render 3D content embedded right in your application! Using libx3d, you can store your 3D objects to hard disk in XML for later retrieval. libx3d follows the specifications from the Web3D consortium.

Technical Features

When you purchase a Maintenance Contract or our First Class Support, you also get direct access to our Source Code Repository. This means no waiting for releases and updates: you get access to all the bug fixes, enhancements, documentations, packages, pre-compiled libraries for your systems, all at your fingertip!

the sandbox works under the following systems:

• MS-Windows 2000/XP/Vista
• Mac OS/X 10.4 and newer
• GNU/Linux with kernel 2.4 or 2.6

the sandbox includes the following libraries:

• atk/atkmm
• cairo/cairomm
• curl
• freetype
• glib/glibmm
• gtk+-2.0/gtkmm
• gtkglext/gtkglextmm
• libiconv
• libjpeg
• libnoise
• libpng
• librsvg
• libsigc++
• libssh2
• libx3d
• libxml2
• osb-jscore/osb-nrcit/osb-nrcore
• pango
• sswf
• tiff
• zlib

the sandbox is designed to integrate seamlessly with molib using motk, the Made to Order Software cross-platform toolkit.