peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (08/29/89)
It's all very well to standardise the look-n-feel of man interface, but the important part is to standardise the programmer interface to window systems. Is anyone doing any real work on this? Ideally, there should be some sort of high-level call standard that lets an application open a window, create buttons, text panes, menus, scroll- bars, and so on. To convert the program from Motif-style to OpenLook- style should just require setting some parameters... or at worst a recompilation. I know of a fairly simple attempt at this, called STDWIN. I've made it available in the amiga-sources archive on uunet (ironically, there isn't an Amiga port of it... but I think it's important). Programs written using the STDWIN interface are portable to the Macintosh, X, and even text displays using curses. Is anyone else working on something like this? -- Peter da Silva, *NIX support guy @ Ferranti International Controls Corporation. Biz: peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. Fun: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com. `-_-' "Just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that isn't immune to bullets" 'U` -- The Brigadier, Dr Who.
peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (08/29/89)
It just occurred to me that my last message could be interpreted as a claim that I wrote STDWIN, or at least had a hand in it. No, I'm just the moderator of the alt.sources.amiga group (such as it is), and the amiga-sources archive. Here's part of the README for stdwin: +------- |[Last modified on Wed Nov 9 13:42:51 MET 1988 by guido] | |This directory contains the STDWIN distribution. | |STDWIN is copyrighted: Copyright (c) 1988 by Stichting Mathematisch |Centrum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. STDWIN is available for |noncommercial use only, free of charge, and with no guarantees. It can |be freely used and distributed provided these restrictions are honoured. -- Peter da Silva, *NIX support guy @ Ferranti International Controls Corporation. Biz: peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. Fun: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com. `-_-' "Just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that isn't immune to bullets" 'U` -- The Brigadier, Dr Who.
buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck) (08/29/89)
In article <5910@ficc.uu.net>, peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes: > It's all very well to standardise the look-n-feel of man interface, but the > important part is to standardise the programmer interface to window systems. > Is anyone doing any real work on this? > > Ideally, there should be some sort of high-level call standard that lets > an application open a window, create buttons, text panes, menus, scroll- > bars, and so on. To convert the program from Motif-style to OpenLook- > style should just require setting some parameters... or at worst a > recompilation. > > Is anyone else working on something like this? You might look up the recent paper by Marc Rochkind in the Usenix Summer '89 proceedings, "A Unified Programming Interface for Character-Based and Graphical Window Systems." It discusses his commercial product called the Extensible Virtual Toolkit (XVT). His goal was to create a smooth migration path from character graphics to bitmapped screens, and the big problem is that the entire programming model for the application changes. XVT gives the GUI programming model for character displays, and supplies an X implementation for when the client wishes to change to bitmap screens. A side benefit of XVT is that one could relatively easily move to other GUIs as needed. (Only X is available now.) -- A. Lester Buck ...!texbell!moray!siswat!buck
peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (08/30/89)
In article <445@siswat.UUCP>, buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck) writes: > XVT gives the GUI programming model for character displays, and supplies > an X implementation for when the client wishes to change to bitmap screens. (he digs out the Usenix Summer '89 proceedings, and Winter '89 proceedings) Unfortunately, XVT specifies look & feel and policy (menu bars, text insertion point is a caret, etc), as well as a program interface. The description of the X port in the Winter proceedings indicates that the XVT user interface is pretty much cast in stone. This, of course, makes it less than ideal as a standard program interface to use for multiple user interfaces. As I indicated in my original article, you should not have to do more than change your libraries and run Make to switch from OpenLook to Motif or GEM or whatever. -- Peter da Silva, *NIX support guy @ Ferranti International Controls Corporation. Biz: peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. Fun: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com. `-_-' 'U` "How many humans does it take to change a light bulb?"