Introduction

Welcome to The Orbital Widget Toolkit, an introductory book about OrbTk. The Rust programming language helps you write faster and reliable software. OrbTk contribute the needed crates, to develop modern graphical user interfaces. It offers a single code base that compiles to native binary code that is executed on your target platform.

Features

• Modern lightweight API
• Cross platform
• Modular crates
• Based on Entity Component System library DCES
• Flexible event system
• Integrated widget library
• Custom widgets
• Custom theming engine
• Dynamic theme switching
• Integrated debugging tools
• Localization

Supported Platforms

• Redox OS (native)
• Linux (native | cargo-node)
• macOS (native | cargo-node)
• Windows (native | cargo-node)
• openBSD (not tested, but should work)
• Web (cargo-node)
• Android (native planned | cargo-node)
• iOS (native planned | cargo-node planned)
• Ubuntu Touch (native planned | cargo-node planned)

Who OrbTk Is For

OrbTk is ideal for programmers that like to take advantage of the Rust programming language. No need to transform data structures and types: OrbTk itself is coded in Rust. It naturally adopts all the structural advantages and provides the needed GUI elements to code your application. Let’s look at a few of the most important groups.

Teams of Developers

Rust is proving to be a productive tool for collaborating among large teams of developers with varying levels of systems programming knowledge. Have a look at the Rust book that elaborates the fundamental principles that enables you to produce more secure code.

OrbTk reuses the Rust toolchain as much as possible. Contemporary developer that have passed the learning curve will take advantage of:

• Cargo, the included dependency manager and build tool, makes adding, compiling, and managing dependencies painless and consistent across the Rust ecosystem.
• Rustfmt ensures a consistent coding style across developers.
• The Rust Language Server powers Integrated Development Environment (IDE) integration for code completion and inline error messages.

Students

Rust is for students and those who are interested in learning about systems concepts. Using Rust, many people have learned about topics like operating systems development. The community is very welcoming and happy to answer student questions. Through efforts such as this book, the Rust teams want to make systems concepts more accessible to more people, especially those new to programming.

Companies

Hundreds of companies, large and small, use Rust in production for a variety of tasks. Those tasks include command line tools, web services, DevOps tooling, embedded devices, audio and video analysis and transcoding, cryptocurrencies, bioinformatics, search engines, Internet of Things applications, machine learning, and even major parts of the Firefox web browser.

Open Source Developers

OrbTk is for people who want to build with the Rust programming language, its community, its developer tools, and libraries. We’d love to have you contribute to its crates and entities.

Who This Book Is For

This book assumes that you’ve written code in another programming language and other GUI toolkits. We do not make any assumptions about which specific one. We’ve tried to make the material broadly accessible to those from a wide variety of development backgrounds. We don’t spend a lot of time talking about what programming is or how to think about it. If you’re entirely new to programming, you would be better served by reading a book that specifically provides an introduction to programming.

How to Use This Book

In general, this book assumes that you’re reading it in sequence from front to back. Later chapters build on concepts in earlier chapters, and earlier chapters might not delve into details on a topic; we typically revisit the topic in a later chapter.

You’ll find two kinds of chapters in this book: concept chapters and project chapters. In concept chapters, you’ll learn about an aspect of OrbTk. In project chapters, we’ll build small programs together, applying what you’ve learned so far.

Chapter 1 explains how to install Rust and OrbTk, how to write a minimal program, and how to use Cargo, Rust’s package manager and build tool.

Finally, some appendixes contain useful information about the in a more reference-like format. Appendix A covers OrbTk’s keywords, Appendix B covers OrbTk’s derivable traits and crates.

There is no wrong way to read this book: if you want to skip ahead, go for it! You might have to jump back to earlier chapters if you experience any confusion. But do whatever works for you.

An important part of the process of learning OrbTk is learning how to read the error messages the compiler displays: these will guide you toward working code. As such, we’ll provide many examples that don’t compile along with the error message the compiler will show you in each situation. Know that if you enter and run a random example, it may not compile! Make sure you read the surrounding text to see whether the example you’re trying to run is meant to error. Ferris will also help you distinguish code that isn’t meant to work:

Ferris	Meaning
This code does not compile!
This code panics!
This code block contains unsafe code.
This code does not produce the desired behavior.

In most situations, we’ll lead you to the correct version of any code that doesn’t compile.

Source Code

The source files from which this book is generated can be found on the Homepage at Orbtk book (en).