Widget toolkit

Toolkit or toolbox (English for tool set ) is a term used in electronic data processing. It generally refers to a collection of libraries, classes, and interfaces that will facilitate the creation of computer programs. Goal of a toolkit is a programmer to facilitate the development of applications by standard functions are provided.

The term Toolkit is not clearly defined or delineated. Various manufacturers refer to some very different tools for software development as a toolkit.

Area of ​​application

Toolkits provide a programmer many standard features and interfaces of an environment for which a program is to be developed, prefabricated available. Thus, a developer does not need to program typical calls of the environment itself, as these are provided by the toolkit. In addition, some toolkits also provide additional programs and tools available such as development environments.

The advantage is that a developer can so completely focused on his program and realize the more general tasks with the toolkit. In addition to significantly less work for the developers, this also brings a uniformity of programs of the same toolkit with it.

Graphical toolkits

In the context of graphical user environments toolkits represent typical user elements such as file open dialogs, buttons, and menu bars. Some graphical toolkits will also list additional programs to simplify the forms of graphical interfaces and dialogues. A well-known example is the designer of the Qt toolkit.

Known graphical toolkits are Apple's Cocoa and platform independent toolkit Qt and GTK .