battle@umbc3.UMBC.EDU (Rick) (11/17/89)
My boss hit me with a question today that was a surprise. He wanted to know what the relationship is (if any) between Xwindows and PM. I have never seen any software vendor who writes for the DOS-OS/2 (PM) world also write for Xwindows. My feeling is that Xwindows will stay in the UNIX world and PM will stay in the OS/2 world. Does anyone know or feel any different? Does anyone see Lotus or Ashton-Tate or Word Perfect, etc., announcing a Xwindows interface? Have fun....thanks Rick Battle
is813cs@pyr.gatech.EDU (Cris Simpson) (11/17/89)
In article <2528@umbc3.UMBC.EDU> battle@umbc3.UMBC.EDU (Rick) writes: >My boss hit me with a question today that was a surprise. He >wanted to know what the relationship is (if any) between Xwindows >and PM. I have never seen any software vendor who writes for the >DOS-OS/2 (PM) world also write for Xwindows. > Not yet, but it's coming. PM will be the basis for the OSF interface. It will also use the DECwindows API [1]. HP and MS have been working closely on this. SCO is doing a lot of the work of the port, to be called PM/X [2]. PM/X will allegedly allow existing PM API calls to be ported directly [3]. >My feeling is that Xwindows will stay in the UNIX world and PM >will stay in the OS/2 world. > I don't think so. I think PM/X will bring them quite close. Another thing to consider is the role of Lan Manager on Unix. HP is close to releasing LM/X, which will allow Unix,OS/2, and DOS to work on the same net. HP's LM/X will support TCP/IP. [*] MS has said that OS/2 will be POSIX compliant, so maybe heterogenous distributed computing really may be a reality. Oh, yeah. AT&T will be including LM/X in a future release of UNIX, which is, by the way, a trademark of AT&T. (Ever wonder why you never hear about AT&T itself being a trademark?) >Does anyone know or feel any different? Does anyone see Lotus or >Ashton-Tate or Word Perfect, etc., announcing a Xwindows >interface? > Both WordDefect and Word 5.0 are available under Unix. (Whose *nix, I don't remember.) >Have fun....thanks > >Rick Battle References: [1] PC Week, Jan 9, 1989 [2] Computer Systems News, Jan 9, 1989 [3] PC Week, Feb 27, 1989 [*] I forget where this all came from. I really saw it, though. Weeeell, as the Chinese curse says, these ARE interesting times. cris -- || Gee, do you think it'd help if I plugged in both ends of this cable? || Cris Simpson Computer Engineer VA Rehab R&D Center GATech Atlanta,GA is813cs@pyr.gatech.edu ...!{Almost Anywhere}!gatech!gitpyr!is813cs
madd@world.std.com (jim frost) (11/18/89)
battle@umbc3.UMBC.EDU (Rick) writes: >My boss hit me with a question today that was a surprise. He >wanted to know what the relationship is (if any) between Xwindows >and PM. I have never seen any software vendor who writes for the >DOS-OS/2 (PM) world also write for Xwindows. > >My feeling is that Xwindows will stay in the UNIX world and PM >will stay in the OS/2 world. I think it's more likely that X will be a large multivendor product, of which PCs are a subset, while PM will remain exclusively on PCs. There are some differences between PM and X, but generally X is more advanced. It has support for a wide range of hardware types, while PM is pretty narrow (and simpler because of this). Both have design flaws which make them a pain in the neck for developers, but they're different flaws. Several software houses with which I am familiar have chosen the same path I have in the past: implement a library layer which your application speaks to, and re-implement that library for each new environment. This layered approach works incredibly well. I'm fairly certain, for instance, that I could move several applications I've written to PM in a few days including the learning curve. In one case we moved an application from X11 to SGI GL in four hours (they are extremely dissimilar) with this kind of architecture. Not bad for an intensive graphics program with better than 35k lines of code. The biggest reason why you haven't seen a lot of companies do this for their products is purely audience. Traditionally PC-based companies are sticking with PCs and porting to PM, since their traditional customers have PCs. Traditionally workstation-based companies are sticking with workstations, which means X right now, for the same reason. I think we'll see more merging as PC vendors realize that they can get more done easier on workstations than on PCs, but I don't expect workstation-based vendors to go to PCs -- it's too hard to get complex applications to run (you don't want a 40,000-line application to be written in MSC, let me tell you, even if people had PCs which could run such a beast, and 40,000-line applications are low-end on workstations) and the people that want them just don't want to deal with PC problems. There are other reasons why vendors aren't writing for both. The programming environments are quite dissimilar. I heard rumors that the OS/2 people deliberately avoided UNIXisms when designing their product. This strikes me as asinine (there are many things in UNIX which are done cleaner than they are in OS/2) and it makes it difficult to get good portability between OS/2 and traditional X environments. It works the other way, too -- threaded designs don't port to most UNIXs right now. But then again, most programmers don't use threaded designs effectively so it's pretty moot. Food for thought. jim frost software tool & die madd@std.com
jkrueger@dgis.dtic.dla.mil (Jon) (11/18/89)
is813cs@pyr.gatech.EDU (Cris Simpson) writes: >... PM will be the basis for the OSF interface ... PM/X will >allegedly allow existing PM API calls to be ported directly [3]. >[3] PC Week, Feb 27, 1989 Interesting. How will you port the other way? -- Jon -- Jonathan Krueger jkrueger@dtic.dla.mil uunet!dgis!jkrueger Isn't it interesting that the first thing you do with your color bitmapped window system on a network is emulate an ASR33?
jordan@Morgan.COM (Jordan Hayes) (12/01/89)
Cris Simpson <is813cs@pyr.gatech.edu> writes: PM will be the basis for the OSF interface. It will also use the DECwindows API [1]. [1] PC Week, Jan 9, 1989 Hmmm. This is Slightly misleading (and perhaps out of date) information. The PM GUI has seven (at last count) differences from Motif, the OSF selection. Examples include the "little box/big box" gadgets in Motif for minimize/maximize vs. the down-arrow/up-arrow for PM (upper right hand corner of the frame). Motif and DecWindows are both Xt Intrinsics-based, so the API is best described as "Intrinsics-based" rather than "DecWindows-based" ... Note that the PM API is extremely different from the Motif API; only the GUI is similar ... HP and MS have been working closely on this. SCO is doing a lot of the work of the port, to be called PM/X. PM/X will allegedly allow existing PM API calls to be ported directly. It's not suprising that the API of PM and PM/X would be similar (look what Sun did with their OpenLook toolkit that smells like SunView). What will be suprising is how many vendors wind up making versions of their software available to run under PM/X (*not* PM -- i'm talking about having an MS-Word window on your SparcStation, coming from some 486 somewhere, not running the application on the Sun itself). > Does anyone know or feel any different? Does anyone see > Lotus or Ashton-Tate or Word Perfect, etc., announcing a > Xwindows interface? Both WordDefect and Word 5.0 are available under Unix. (Whose *nix, I don't remember.) Both the Word and WordPerfect products are the 80x25 screen PC versions, not the Windows version (or the Mac version for that matter). Sorry, but until I can have WYSIWYG, I still need my PC/Mac. In fact, WordPerfect for UNIX is 4.2 based, with no plans to port 5.0 (or 5.1, which actually can use a mouse for some of the character-based stuff it does, without a window manager running -- you can click at menu choices, to a certain extent). WordPerfect has (at last check, two weeks ago) no plans for a Unix version that runs under X (running wp in an xterm doesn't count), but Bill Gates claims PM/X ports for all major MS products "in the future" ... /jordan
is813cs@pyr.gatech.EDU (Cris Simpson) (12/01/89)
In article <556@s5.Morgan.COM> jordan@Morgan.COM (Jordan Hayes) writes: >Cris Simpson <is813cs@pyr.gatech.edu> writes: > > PM will be the basis for the OSF interface. It will also use > the DECwindows API [1]. > >Hmmm. This is Slightly misleading (and perhaps out of date) >information. The PM GUI has seven (at last count) differences from >Motif, the OSF selection. Examples include the "little box/big box" [some stuff deleted] I will defer to those with more knowledge on the subject. As a followup to original message, I mentioned a column by Ross Greenberg in _Unix Today!_. In the Oct 30 issue, Greenberg (..uunet!utoday!greenber) pretty much blasts MS for some of their decisions on PM/X. cris -- Cris Simpson | Computer Engineer | No, No! Not THOSE chains! VA Rehab R&D Center | -K. Marx Atlanta,GA is813cs@pyr.gatech.edu |