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 Who uses wxWidgets?
To help you decide whether wxWidgets is for you, here are some
categories of wxWidgets user and application examples.
See also an alphabetical list of some of our users,
applications,
and the excellent feedback we are receiving.
Industry |
Public sector |
Open source |
Individual developer
- Industry
-
Many companies have chosen wxWidgets, for a number of reasons. Portability
gives you a competitive advantage, and it allows you to protect your valuable
intellectual property from some of the many forces at work in the industry.
For example, moving to Linux increases your application's relevance and
potentially opens up new markets to you. But at the same time, you may wish
to proceed cautiously because you're not sure the market is there or whether
Linux itself could be under threat from predatory IP claims.
wxWidgets enables you to hedge your bets, and cover the major platforms
without having to commit to them.
As wxWidgets is truly open source, you have the assurance that your code is built
on a foundation that can never go away, for example due to the vendor going
bankrupt or being taken over, or the product being withdrawn. There are no royalty payments and the
licence is commerce-friendly.
The wxWidgets community gives you a lot of support for free, and you
can buy extra support from developers
with years of wxWidgets experience.
Below, we illustrate the use of wxWidgets in a sample of industry sectors.
- Geological industries
- Dynamic Graphics, Inc. sells
advanced 3D model-building tools to the oil and gas industries.
MapTek
produces Vulcan 3D,
a leading geological modelling and mine planning package.
- Document management
- Xerox USA.
has used wxWidgets for its
Variable-data Intelligent PostScript Printware
system.
- Chip manufacture
- Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
have used wxWidgets to build an in-house circuit viewer. Steve Hooper, who
worked on the Alpha chip, said, "we LOVE wxWidgets in Compaq's Alpha
microprocessor development group".
WaveWizard
by Test Insight Ltd.
is test program generation software for semiconductor devices.
- Defence and space
- The Center for Naval Analyses, USA,
have developed a scheme that ties desktop Windows 2000 PCs connected by an ordinary LAN
into a virtual computer that can be used for distributed parallel computing. All the tools they build
to configure, manage, control, and monitor the virtual supercomputer use wxWidgets for their GUIs.
Geneva Aerospace, USA,
uses wxWidgets in the simulation and control of unmanned aircraft. Lockheed Martin
have used wxWidgets for a number of projects. NASA have used wxWidgets for developing
the NASGRO
fracture mechanics and fatigue crack growth analysis software.
- Graphics and music
- MojoWorld
is an extraordinary world-building tool from Pandromeda.
Intuitive MX
is a multitrack audio studio for recording, mixing and applying effects to music.
- The public sector and education
- wxWidgets is ideal for government organisations, especially
with the growing movement away from reliance on proprietary solutions.
Using open source products helps protect the people who rely
on government systems: there is no possibility of being held to
ransom by a company producing the basic framework, and as noted
above, open source is available for ever and not just for the lifetime
of a company.
Many government organisations are considering a move to Linux
from Windows. wxWidgets is great for helping achieve the transition:
applications can be compiled for either platform, whilst
maintaining only one set of sources. Users find that wxWidgets
is particular easy to migrate to from MFC; and wxWidgets can be
used with ODBC and other database systems.
Here are a few examples of the use of wxWidgets in the public sector
and education.
- Medicine
- Dartmouth Medical School
is creating a multimedia authoring tool with wxWidgets.
Advanced Concepts AG
produces medical software for Windows and Mac.
The National Human Genome Research Institute, USA,
used wxWidgets for ComboScreen, an organizational framework for analytical tools required for the high-throughput
screening of clone arrays with pools of probes.
The National Center for Biotechnology Information
use wxWidgets for Cn3D,
a 3D model viewer for biomolecular structures.
CTSim
simulates the process of transmitting X-rays through phantom objects.
- Music
- The WEDLEMUSIC project
at the University of Florence is using wxWidgets.
The popular Audacity sound
editor was started by the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Music Group.
- Archaeology
- Archaeoptics Ltd.
use wxWidgets for Demon, an
application for interactive visualisation and analysis of high-density 3D laser scan datasets.
- Open source projects
-
If you browse through the projects on SourceForge you'll find
a large number that use wxWidgets. Attractions include the GPL-compatible licence
(approved by the Open Source Initiative), and the fact that anyone can download and compile your open source
application since the framework is also open source.
The Open Source Applications
Foundation, founded by well-knowing industry figures including Mitch Kapor and Andy Hertzfeld,
uses wxPython for its Chandler PIM project.
The database administration applications pgAdmin III
and SQLiteCC have been
written with wxWidgets.
- The individual developer
- Solo programmers like wxWidgets because it helps them
to produce applications for multiple platforms at very
low cost. wxWidgets can be viewed as the distillation
of dozens of programmers' expertise, across a range of platforms.
This is a tremendous leg-up for those with few resources,
and there is a wide choice of compilers and other tools to use with
wxWidgets, allowing development of highly sophisticated
applications on a tight budget.
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