Agar is a modern open-source, cross-platform toolkit for graphical applications implemented in C, C++, Perl and Ada (with bindings to other languages in development). Designed for ease of integration, it follows the philosophy of building the GUI around the application, and not the other way around. The Agar GUI library is designed to work under almost any platform that provides a graphic display and input device. Beginning with the 1.4 series, Agar can be built without any dependencies, and has even been used on embedded devices without any operating system.
The driver interface introduced in the 1.4 series allows easier porting to new platforms and graphics systems. Like traditional GUI toolkits, Agar can interface with an underlying window system (i.e., Xlib, Windows API), but Agar can also provide its own window manager if there is no underlying window system (as used, for example, with the SDL direct-video driver, dumb framebuffers, low-level LCD controllers). Unlike most other GUI toolkits, Agar takes maximum advantage of hardware graphics acceleration where available. When compiled with optional threads support, the Agar API is entirely thread-safe.
The base Agar library is intended to be as general and compact as possible. Separate libraries extending Agar in more specialized applications include Agar-MATH (math extensions), Agar-VG (vector graphics), Agar-RG (feature-based graphics), Agar-DEV (developer tools) and FreeSG (scene-graph and computational geometry).
Agar is free software. Its source code is freely usable and re-usable by everyone under a BSD license, which allows use in commercial applications free of charge. Agar is stable, well-maintained and has been growing organically since early 2002. The Agar project is sponsored and hosted by Csoft.net Hosting.
| 03/20/2011 |
New stable release: 1.4.1
[ Download | What's new] |
| 04/16/2010 |
New stable release: 1.4.0
[ Download | What's new] |
| 10/23/2009 | Most of the major code changes for the Agar 1.4 release have been committed to Subversion. Please test! Since Agar 1.4 includes new drivers interfacing with low-level graphics systems, it requires thorough testing under as many different platforms as possible. |
| 08/30/2009 |
New stable release: 1.3.4
[ Download | What's new] |
| 06/03/2009 |
Due to some changes in the build system, users of the latest
development version of Agar (as of r8187) who rely on the
make proj feature, must upgrade to
BSDBuild-2.5.
|
| 10/30/2008 |
New stable release: 1.3.3
[ Download | What's new ] |
| 03/02/2008 |
New stable release: 1.3.2
[ Download | What's new ] |
| 03/02/2008 | Created agar-commits mailing list for automated commit notifications of the Agar source code exlusively. Note that the previous source-diff list will continue to receive notices as well. The new list provides a RSS feed. |
[Previous announcements]
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact the maintainer. There are also forums and an #agar channel on irc.freenode.net (here is a web interface to it).
Your feedback and contributions help us build a better library with better documentation. Don't hesitate to send us your bug reports and enhancement/feature requests with Bugzilla.
"A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is like a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland." -- Ivan Sutherland