Rapicorn is an experimental graphical user interface toolkit. It is still in early development phase and doesn't provide all the features and functionality that other mature toolkits provide like:
Visitors searching for a stable and mature GUI toolkit are currently better off turning to the above two projects.
- Contact & downloads information: rapicorn.html.
Applied technologies
Rapicorn is targeted at becoming a suitable replacement for canvas projects such as GnomeCanvas and to some extend also cover aspects of projects like Gtk+.
It is currently planned to employ the following technologies:
- Depend on the GNU C++ Compiler for C++ language support,
- depend on the Cairo library for 2D graphics rendering,
- depend on the Pango library for text layout and rendering,
- depend on the PNG library for image imports,
- depend on the zlib library for data compression,
- possibly use other libraries for animations or 3D effects.
Feature set
Rapicorn so far supports separate item interface and implementation hierarchies, intra-hierarchy cross-references of objects and type safe per-object signal emissions. It also already has a Gtk+ based blitting backend (planned to be replaced by a native Cairo/xlib backend at some future point), a Pango based text rendering backend, PNG based image support, basic event processing and focus handling.
It comes with a prototype set of stock items such as:
- a Label,
- an Image view,
- Buttons,
- Sliders,
- a ScrollArea,
- layout containers: Table, HBox, VBox, Alignment,
- paint containers: Ambiance, Frames,
- paintable items: Arrow, DotGrid and Drawable.
It also provides an XML markup parser that allows full GUI definitions to be written in XML, the basic ideas of which are sketched out here: http://blogs.gnome.org/view/timj/2005/07/31/0.