weinrich@clarity.Princeton.EDU (Tim Weinrich) (04/24/91)
We are trying to choose an X toolkit to use for a project, and I would be interested in people's opinions on the various toolkits available. We are hoping to finish a draft of this program in not much more than a man-month, so learning time is quite important to us. But we will probably continue to modify the program for years, so ease of programming is also relevant. We would like to be able to give this away to several sites, so the toolkit should be common and/or inexpensive. Here are some particular questions we have: How would you compare Motif to Open Look? Which is easier to learn/program in? Which has better documentation? What other differences are relevant? How would you compare high-level toolkits, as a class, to Xt? Am I crazy for even considering Xt? Is it too hard to use? Is it much easier to learn? What are the other high-level toolkits we should consider besides Motif and Open Look? I have heard there are public-domain toolkits, but I have also heard that some of them are pretty ugly. It would be nice if we could use something in the public domain, since that would make it easier for other people to run our program. One person told me that Open Look doesnt run on very many machines. Is that true? What about programming directly in xlib? Is it as awful as some people have said? I have found the xlib documentation to be quite readable, so I wonder if the decreased learning time might partially offset the increased time in re-inventing all those wheels. Please let me know what you think about this. Reply directly to me and, if anyone says anything useful, I'll summarize to the net. Thanx! Twinerik