robertlight@attmail.COM (01/27/91)
I am searching for a toolkit which can support both X, Mac and MS-Windows environments. Am I searching for a holy grail? Are the metaphors as seen by the application similar enough that such a beast could be developed? It seems like their ought to be a C++ library out there where depending on the target system: X, Macintosh or MS-Windows, you could link with a different implementation of the object libary while keeping your application code unified across all platforms. If anyone has such a beast, or knows of such a beast, let me know: send email to robertlight@attmail.com - Bob Light, Acton, MA
lowey@herald.usask.ca (Kevin Lowey) (01/29/91)
From article <9101271532.AA20410@expo.lcs.mit.edu>, by robertlight@attmail.COM: > I am searching for a toolkit which can support both X, Mac and MS-Windows > environments. Am I searching for a holy grail? Are the metaphors as seen > by the application similar enough that such a beast could be developed? It > seems like their ought to be a C++ library out there where depending on > the target system: X, Macintosh or MS-Windows, you could link with a different > implementation of the object libary while keeping your application code > unified across all platforms. If anyone has such a beast, or knows of > such a beast, let me know: send email to robertlight@attmail.com > - Bob Light, Acton, MA I am also interested in this. I want to write some GUI based applications. X-Window seems to be the best choice for this. The disadvantage for PC users though is that to run the program you need some other piece of software. Either you purchase an X-Server and run your application on a host Unix or VMS system, or you need something like DESQview /X which is supposed to do both the client and server on the same machine. What I would like is an implementation of the Xlib that simply translates the X-11 subroutine calls into the native system GUI, like MAC Finder, Ms-Windows, Amiga Intuition, or OS/2 Presentation Manager. I'm not talking about making an X-Server. I'm talking about compiling source code written using Xlib to make stand-alone PC applications. I could then write the application in portable C code, block off the OS specific stuff in #IFDEFS, and then compile the program to run under X, MS-Windows, Macintosh, Amiga Intuition, OS/2 Presentation Manager, etc. I realize that not all the capabilities of X-Window could be emulated, but a lot of the stuff would also not be needed such as all the communication protocol code required in a server to pack and unpack packets between the client and server. The advantage is I get portable code, and the micro users don't need to be running an X-Server to run the application under their particular GUI environment. I would only have to write for one GUI, instead of supporting ten or twenty different GUI interfaces. Does anyone know of any libraries that do this for various platforms. Perhaps it is impossible. I admit that I haven't done any X-Window programming yet, so perhaps such a subroutine library would be impractical on micros. However, it never hurts to ask #8-) Please send your responses to LOWEY@SASK.USASK.CA. I will summarise. - Kevin Lowey