<chapter>
    <title>Introduction</title>

    <section>
        <title>What is it?</title>
    
        
        <mediaobject>
        <imageobject>
            <imagedata align="right" scale="70" fileref="../images/wx.png" format="PNG"/>
        </imageobject>
        </mediaobject>

        <para>
            The wxWidgets Package Manager project (abbreviated as <emphasis>wxWPM</emphasis>)
            project provide the tools to create and use a new format of 
            <emphasis>source packages</emphasis>: the wxWidgets packages.
        </para>
        <para>
            <ulink url="http://www.wxwidgets.org">wxWidgets</ulink> gives you a single, easy-to-use API for writing GUI applications on multiple platforms that still utilize the native platform's controls and utilities. Link with the appropriate library for your platform (Windows/Unix/Mac, others coming shortly) and compiler (almost any popular C++ compiler), and your application will adopt the look and feel appropriate to that platform. On top of great GUI functionality, wxWidgets gives you: online help, network programming, streams, clipboard and drag and drop, multithreading, image loading and saving in a variety of popular formats, database support, HTML viewing and printing, and much much more.
        </para>
        
        <para>
            The concept is very similar to the DevC++'s devpacks but unlike them wxWidgets 
            packages are cross-platform and are completely abstracted from the build system 
            used by the packaged project: i.e. any kind of cross-platform build system which 
            provides the BUILD, INSTALL, UNINSTALL logical operations is supported.
        </para>
        <para>
            The first application provided is a GUI manager which can be used to browse remote 
            repositories of packages, download the selected ones, build them using the 
            user-specified configuration and finally install them.
        </para>
        <para>
            The second applications is the packager: an easy-to-use tool which creates the 
            wxWidgets packages and implements some logic to recognize the build system used, 
            the programming language used, etc.
            
            The third application is a command-line manager which provides all functionalities 
            of previous apps from command-line.
            
            This project was initially sponsorised by Google in its Summer Of Code 2006. 
        </para>
    </section>


    <section>
        <title>Why do we need it?</title>
    
        <para>
        TOWRITE
        </para>
    </section>

    <section>
        <title>Extending/reusing it</title>
    
        <para>
            The sources of the wxWPM project are aimed to be as much reusable as possible.
            Thus they are built in a modules and each module is compiled as a library.
        </para>
        <para>
            For more info about the internal API of wxWPM please look at the <ulink url="http://www.doxygen.org">Doxygen</ulink>-generated <ulink url="../api/index.html">documentation</ulink>.
        </para>
    </section>

</chapter>
