what is a "toolkit"?

[H@t Trick]

Hi,
I think I have figured this out but forgive me for asking anyways. what is a toolkit?
In all my programming all my gui's were built using the IDE, ex C++, VB .Net (which sucks btw), PL/SQL (ok bad example probably and because I never understood databases and SQL), etc. Java I built my gui's using code. I just figured the GUI was always built using the language you were programming in and the IDE did much of the work for you in the language you were coding in. For Java, are the toolkits AWT (now deprecated I think) or Swing? The concept of a toolkit was NEVER discussed. Is this generally a Linux/Unix programming concept?

[Trappski]

I think this pretty much wraps it all up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget_toolkit


While an IDE may feature a GUI-builder there still is code underneath.
VS tries to hide it away as much as possible. And fiddling with the code created by the builder can result in unexpected results.
Netbeans even locks generated code from editing sometimes.

[kakaroto]

really.. I didn't know you were such a n00b :p
a toolkit is a library providing a set of widgets (user interface elements like : windows, buttons, frames, labels, checkboxes, menus, etc...)
QT is one toolkit, GTK is another toolkit, cocoa is another, Win32 also has its toolkit (MFC or whatever), and yes, java has AWT and Swing etc...

[H@t Trick]

LOL a noob when it comes to real world programming and GUI programming yes, besides I'm a hardware guy (not an engineer but a technologist), ask about the components on your motherboard and transistors in your cpu, that I can answer, hence the assembler and machine language coding experience.
So a toolkit is basically what I thought it was, just never knew they were called toolkits. So tk is the toolkit for tcl, is it written using tcl code like swing is written using java code? and GTK/QT, are they in C or C++, or are they essentially languages unto themselves? Do they get compiled? tk, I am guessing does not because it is part of tcl which doesn't get compiled. As for MFC, I have heard of it but I never knew what it was.

Thanks for the answers

[kakaroto]

Tk is written in C!!!! don't you know, you install "tcl AND tk"... tcl is the interpreter for the language, and Tk is a 'tcl extension/package' that contains the toolkit...
GTK is in C (using gobject), QT is in C++...
MFC, I'm not sure either what it is.. I know it stands for Microsoft Foundation Classes.. but not sure exactly what they do... :p

[Daniel15]

The Windows one is part of the API and is just known as "Windows Forms" or something... No idea . There's wrappers around this, like MFC (used in C++), VCL (Visual Component Library, used in Delphi), LCL (Lazarus Component Library, used by Lazarus/FreePascal), the one that .NET uses (WinForms I think?), etc.

Edit: Some references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_widget_toolkits
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WxWidgets