wxWidgets is a mature and very powerful cross-platform GUI framework with a very liberal non-restrictive license. It has a very big community behind it and a also has a huge support base. There are tons of tutorials, excellent examples and many companies large and small have successfully used wxWidgets to develop their applications. When it comes to GUI frameworks, wxWidgets is among the best out there.

Code::Blocks is more of a “new kid on the block” Integrated Development Environment when it comes to IDEs in general. If you see the design and layout of the IDE, you can unmistakably see traces of Microsoft Developer Studio and KDE Development environment in it. It reminds me more of the old Visual Studio 6.0 IDE. Programmers who have worked on the VC IDE v6.0 and Code::Blocks will know what I mean. Code::Blocks is written using wxWidgets and shares a very close relationship with wxWidgets framework.

wxWidgets is very similar in design to MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes), so developers who have worked on MFC tend to gravitate towards wxWidgets more than any other GUI when they have to develop a cross-platform solution. I don’t blame them the least. Learning a brand new framework from scratch can be intimidating even for experienced developers. Being a long time MFC programmer myself, I personally like wxWidgets more than any other GUI out there.

So where does Code::Blocks fit into all of this? Code::Blocks has an integrated GUI editor and code manager (just like the famous “ClassWizard” of VC++ 6.0) for wxWidgets called wxSmith and its is very good for rapid GUI development. Code::Blocks is licensed under GNU GPL so it is the perfect solution for budget development solutions and for programmers that have to pay a bang and a buck for an IDE. The combination of wxWidgets + Code::Blocks takes rapid cross-platform GUI development to the realm of possibility.

A GUI that is very similar to MFC and an IDE that is custom made for it, and not mention all this for ziltch/nada/nothing, seems too good to be true. But wait a minute before you go and make your brand new mega budget office suite, there are some things that are not up to the the mark just yet. As I said earlier Code::Blocks is pretty new and it has some way to go. The IDE has had more than a jagged development path. It’s official 1.0RC release is doggy to say the least, not to mention it was released more than a year ago. The IDE has had a major re-design since then, why, your guess is as good as mine. New projects don’t need redesign this early in their life cycle. Maybe the dev team thought that the IDE could not stand up to others like eclipse, or maybe it was the plug-in system that they added or some other feature, I don’t know.

There hasn’t been a major release of the IDE in a long time and that’s a fact. What the dev team does release, are nightly snapshots and I must say these days the builds of Code::Blocks have been pretty impressive. The product has been in beta for way too long and I wouldn’t put my production projects on it just yet. There are also some issues with stability that the dev team is working on. The last time I checked the IDE was great while using GCC but MS compilers need some work. Though the IDE claims to work with many more compilers, I haven’t checked them all out yet. For Linux development I would recommend this IDE hands down, but for Windows I think I will stick with Visual Studio Express a while longer.

I suspect there is going to a major release of the IDE soon, I hope there is. I am eagerly looking forward to that. But one thing is clear, wxWidgets + Code::Blocks is a win-win combination. I think that wxWidgets will also greatly benefit from a stable Code::Blocks IDE. More people will use it, I am sure. More companies will adopt wxWidgets as a development environment of choice. In any case what Code::Blocks team has achieved is commendable, especially since most other similar project have long gone cold.

References

wxWidgets
Code::Blocks