There are a few terms that will show up all the time while working with your GUI designer software. Before moving on, let’s establish these.

Platform Independent
Platform independence means that C++ GUI objects will automatically look and feel the same across the different operating systems. You do not need to know anything about the different GUI systems in Windows and MacOS and the platform independent code is buried deep inside of VSTGUI. For example, in the advanced GUI design chapter, we will create a view that displays an audio waveform. The drawing code we write is platform-neutral. The low level rendering code handles the translation to the different platforms and we never need to be concerned with any of those details.

Template
A template is a collection of view controls or GUI objects. You can assemble your GUI from pre-made templates that contain clusters of related controls, or you can drag and drop each control, one at a time, into the main GUI designer window. You can make copies of templates to generate sets of similarly grouped controls for a repeated look and feel.

Editor
The top-level template that houses the GUI’s main view is named the Editor. We will reserve this name for that top-level template only.

View Container
A view container is a C++ object that holds some number of GUI view or control objects called children. View containers may be nested and you will often aggregate containers together so that you have a container full of other containers, each of which contains a set of grouped controls.

Views
The GUI view objects that VSTGUI implements are named simply Views.

Attributes
Attributes are used to describe each GUI object. The attributes may be numerical or text strings. You must manually type in some attributes while others are set with drop-list or check box controls. The attributes are stored as XML string-data pairs. You can view the XML file in your compiler or any text editor.