// Copyright (C) 2022 The Qt Company Ltd.
// SPDX-License-Identifier: LicenseRef-Qt-Commercial OR GFDL-1.3-no-invariants-only

/*!
    \page qtgui-overview.html
    \title Qt GUI Overview
    \brief An overview of the Qt GUI module.

    The Qt GUI module provides classes for windowing system integration, event
    handling, OpenGL and OpenGL ES integration, 2D graphics, basic imaging,
    fonts, and text. These classes are used internally by Qt's user interface
    technologies but can also be used directly, for example to write
    applications using low-level OpenGL ES graphics APIs.

    For application developers writing user interfaces, Qt provides higher level
    APIs, like Qt Quick, that are much more suitable than the enablers found in
    the Qt GUI module.

    \section1 Application Windows

    The most important classes in the Qt GUI module are QGuiApplication and
    QWindow. A Qt application that wants to show content on screen has to use
    these. QGuiApplication contains the main event loop, where all events from
    the window system and other sources are processed and dispatched. It also
    handles the application's initialization and finalization.

    The \l QWindow class represents a window in the underlying windowing system.
    It provides a number of virtual functions to handle events (\l {QEvent})
    from the windowing system, such as touch-input, exposure, focus, key
    strokes, and geometry changes.

    \section1 2D Graphics

    The Qt GUI module contains classes for 2D graphics, imaging, fonts,
    and advanced typography.

    A \l QWindow created with the surface type \l {QSurface::RasterSurface} can
    be used in combination with \l {QBackingStore} and \l {QPainter}, Qt's
    highly optimized 2D vector graphics API. QPainter supports drawing lines,
    polygons, vector paths, images, and text. For more information, see \l{Paint
    System} and \l {Raster Window Example}.

    Qt can load and save images using the \l QImage and \l QPixmap classes. By
    default, Qt supports the most common image formats including JPEG and PNG
    among others. Users can add support for additional formats via the \l
    QImageIOPlugin class. For more information, see \l {Reading and Writing
    Image Files}.

    Typography in Qt is done with \l QTextDocument, which uses the \l QPainter
    API in combination with Qt's font classes, primarily QFont. Applications
    that prefer more low-level APIs to text and font handling can use classes
    like QRawFont and QGlyphRun.

    \section1 RHI Graphics

    The Qt Rendering Hardware Interface is an abstraction for hardware accelerated
    graphics APIs, such as, \l{https://www.khronos.org/opengl/}{OpenGL},
    \l{https://www.khronos.org/opengles/}{OpenGL ES},
    \l{https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/direct3d}{Direct3D},
    \l{https://developer.apple.com/metal/}{Metal}, and
    \l{https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/}{Vulkan}.

    As an alternative to using OpenGL or Vulkan directly to render to a
    QWindow, \l QRhi and the related classes provide a portable, cross-platform
    3D graphics and compute API complemented by a shader conditioning and
    transpiling pipeline. This way applications can avoid directly depending on
    a single, and, in some cases, vendor or platform-specific 3D API.

    Below is a list of the main RHI-related classes. These are complemented by
    a number of additional classes and structs.

    \list
        \li QRhi
        \li QShader
        \li QShaderDescription
        \li QRhiCommandBuffer
        \li QRhiResourceUpdateBatch
        \li QRhiBuffer
        \li QRhiRenderBuffer
        \li QRhiTexture
        \li QRhiSampler
        \li QRhiTextureRenderTarget
        \li QRhiShaderResourceBindings
        \li QRhiGraphicsPipeline
        \li QRhiComputePipeline
        \li QRhiSwapChain
    \endlist

    See the \l{RHI Window Example} for an introductory example of creating a
    portable, cross-platform application that performs accelerated 3D rendering
    onto a QWindow using QRhi.

    Working directly with QWindow is the most advanced and often the most
    flexible way of rendering with the QRhi API. It is the most low-level
    approach, however, and limited in the sense that Qt's UI technologies,
    widgets and Qt Quick, are not utilized at all. In many cases applications
    will rather want to integrate QRhi-based rendering into a widget or Qt
    Quick-based user interface. QWidget-based applications may choose to embed
    the window as a native child into the widget hierarchy via
    QWidget::createWindowContainer(), but in many cases \l QRhiWidget will
    offer a more convenient enabler to integrate QRhi-based rendering into a
    widget UI. Qt Quick provides its own set of enablers for extending the
    2D/3D scene with QRhi-based custom rendering.

    \note The RHI family of APIs are currently offered with a limited
    compatibility guarantee, as opposed to regular Qt public APIs. See \l QRhi
    for details.

    \section1 3D Matrix and Vector Math

    The Qt GUI module also contains a few math classes to aid with the most
    common mathematical operations related to 3D graphics. These classes
    include \l {QMatrix4x4}, \l {QVector2D}, \l {QVector3D}, \l {QVector4D},
    and \l {QQuaternion}.

    \section1 OpenGL and OpenGL ES Integration

    QWindow supports rendering using OpenGL and OpenGL ES, depending on what the
    platform supports. OpenGL rendering is enabled by setting the QWindow's
    surface type to QSurface::OpenGLSurface, choosing the format attributes with
    QSurfaceFormat, and then creating a QOpenGLContext to manage the native
    OpenGL context. In addition, Qt has QOpenGLPaintDevice, which enables the
    use of OpenGL accelerated QPainter rendering, as well as convenience classes
    that simplify the writing of OpenGL code and hides the complexities of
    extension handling and the differences between OpenGL ES 2 and desktop
    OpenGL. The convenience classes include QOpenGLFunctions that lets an
    application use all the OpenGL ES 2 functions on desktop OpenGL without
    having to manually resolve the OpenGL function pointers. This enables
    cross-platform development of applications targeting mobile or embedded
    devices, and provides classes that wrap native OpenGL functionality in a
    simpler Qt API:

    \list
        \li QOpenGLBuffer
        \li QOpenGLFramebufferObject
        \li QOpenGLShaderProgram
        \li QOpenGLTexture
        \li QOpenGLDebugLogger
        \li QOpenGLTimerQuery
        \li QOpenGLVertexArrayObject
    \endlist

    Finally, to provide better support for the newer versions (3.0 and
    higher) of OpenGL, a versioned function wrapper mechanism is also available:
    The QOpenGLFunction_N_N family of classes expose all the functions in a
    given OpenGL version and profile, allowing easy development of desktop
    applications that rely on modern, desktop-only OpenGL features.

    For more information, see the \l {OpenGL Window Example}.

    A \l {QWindow} created with the \l {QSurface::OpenGLSurface} can be used in
    combination with \l QPainter and \l QOpenGLPaintDevice to have OpenGL
    hardware-accelerated 2D graphics by sacrificing some of the visual quality.

    \section1 Vulkan Integration

    Qt GUI has support for the \l {Vulkan} API. Qt applications require the
    presence of the \l{LunarG Vulkan SDK}.

    On Windows, the SDK sets the environment variable \c {VULKAN_SDK},
    which will be detected by the \c {configure} script.

    On Android, Vulkan headers were added in API level 24 of the NDK.

    The main relevant classes for low-level Vulkan support are:

    \list
        \li QVulkanInstance
        \li QVulkanFunctions
        \li QVulkanDeviceFunctions
    \endlist

    In addition, \l QVulkanWindow provides a convenience subclass of QWindow
    that makes it easier to get started with implementing Vulkan-based
    rendering targeting a QWindow. Using this helper class is completely
    optional; applications with more advanced Vulkan-based renderers may
    instead want to use a QWindow with the \l {QSurface::VulkanSurface} type
    directly.

    For more information, see the \l{Hello Vulkan Widget Example}
    and the \l {Hello Vulkan Triangle Example}.

    \section1 Drag and Drop

    Qt GUI includes support for drag and drop. The \l{Drag and Drop} overview
    has more information.
*/
