wxBase README
=============
NB: this file applies to wxBase library only. If you are using a GUI version
of wxWindows, please refer to the documentation in the appropriate
subdirectory (msw, gtk, motif &c).
Welcome to wxBase!
0. Introduction
---------------
wxBase is the library providing most of the non-GUI classes of the wxWindows
cross-platform C++ framework. wxBase has some generic classes such as yet
another C++ string class, typesafe dynamic arrays, hashes and lists and, more
excitingly, wxDateTime - a very flexible and powerful class for manipulating
the dates in the range of 580 million years with up to millisecond precision.
Another useful class not present in the standard C++ library is wxRegEx which
allows you to use regular expressions for string matching and replacing.
There are also classes for writing portable programs in C++ painlessly which
encapsulate things like files (and their names), directories, processes,
threads, sockets and much more. Some of the other utility classes allow you to
parse the command line, limit the number of instances of your program
executing simultaneously (portably!) and so on.
1. Requirements and supported platforms
--------------------------------------
wxBase can be compiled and used under Win32, mostly any modern Unix system
(probably including Mac OS X but it wasn't tested there), VMS and BeOS (this
release couldn't be tested under these platforms neither so you might
encounter some problems but they should be easy to solve - please contact us
in this case!)
It is written without using any modern C++ features (such as templates,
exceptions, namespaces) for maximal portability and so you shouldn't have
problems compiling it with any C++ compiler at all. However, we only provide
the project files for Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 for Win32 (any contributions
are welcome!) - but our Unix makefiles will work with any compiler.
2. Installing under Win32
-------------------------
Please note that wxBase can be compiled in different configurations under
Win32: as a static or shared library, in debug or release mode and in ANSI
or Unicode mode for a total of 8 possibilities.
a) Using Visual C++ 6.0
Simply open the src/wxBase.dsw file in MSDEV and build it. When it is
done you can also open samples/console/console.dsp project and build it as
well.
b) Cygwin
Please refer to the Unix section below
c) Borland
Please refer to the docs/msw/install.txt. The console sample compiles and runs
but does not pass all tests (04 sept 02)
d) Other compilers
Unfortunately we don't have the makefiles for any other compilers yet.
Please contact us if you would like to help us with creating one for the
compiler you use.
3. Installing under Unix/BeOS
-----------------------------
NB: If you're building wxBase from the wxWindows distribution and not from a
separate wxBase one you will need to add "--disable-gui" to configure
arguments below!
Please note that GNU make is required to build wxBase!
The recommended way to build wxBase is:
% cd ..../wxWindows
% mkdir base-release
% cd base-release
% ../configure
# ignore the error messages about missing samples
% make
% make install
You can also do:
% mkdir base-debug
% cd base-debug
% ../configure --enable-debug
% make
To build the sample then cd to samples/console and make there.
4. Documentation and support
----------------------------
The console sample provided with this distribution tests most (but not all)
wxBase classes. It doesn't do anything useful per itself but you may want to
look at its code to see examples of usage of the class you are interested in.
There is no separate documentation for wxBase, please refer to wxWindows
documentation instead.
Support for wxBase is available from the same places as for wxWindows itself,
namely:
* Usenet newsgroup comp.soft-sys.wxwindows
* Mailing lists: see http://lists.wxwindows.org/ for more information
* WWW page: http://www.wxwindows.org/
Hope you will find wxBase useful!
Vadim Zeitlin
This file is accurate for the version 2.3.2 of wxBase. It was last modified on
Dec 11, 2001.
b7b45f6ffc