tpn+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Tom Neuendorffer) (01/06/90)
The Information Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon is pleased to
announce the release of new versions of the Andrew Toolkit, the Andrew
Message System and the ODA Tool Kit as part of the January 1990 release
of the X Window System (X.V11R4).
The Andrew Toolkit (ATK) is a portable user-interface toolkit that
runs under X11. It provides a dynamically-loadable object-oriented
environment wherein objects can be embedded in one-another. Thus,
one could use our 'generic-object' editor (ez) to edit text that, in
addition to containing multiple fonts, contains embedded raster
images, spreadsheets, drawing editors, equations, simple animations,
etc.. These embedded objects could themselves contain other objects,
including text. With the toolkit, programmers can create new objects
that can be embedded as easily as those that come with the system.
Many objects, including those mentioned above, along with a help
system, a system monitoring tool (console), an editor based shell
interface (typescript), and support for printing multi-media
documents, are included in the release, making it useful to
programmers and non-programmers alike.
The Andrew Message System(AMS) provides a multi-media interface to
mail and bulletin-boards. AMS contains many advanced features
including authentication, return receipts, automatic sorting of
mail, vote collection and tabulation, enclosures, audit trails of
related messages, and subscription management. It also provides a
variety of interfaces that support ttys and low-function personal
computers in addition to the high-function workstations.
The ODA Tool Kit provides low level support for multi-media
documents represented using the standard: ISO 8613 "Office Document
Architecture".
This release of Andrew contains hundreds of bug fixes, updates and
improvements in both code and documentation. They also contains a
variety of new facilities. The major differences are:
- File names and code have been reworked to support System V Unix.
- The class system has been reorganized to allow easier porting to
new systems.
(Programs for updating old ATK source code to use the new file names
and class conventions are included)
New additions include:
- A full release of ADEW, a direct-manipulation application builder.
- A new embedded language for controlling insets, Ness.
- A collection of data visualization insets, such as chart and bush.
- Footnotes, tables of contents, indexing and page breaks within text.
- A "hyperlink" inset for connecting together files.
- Example files from Nathaniel Borenstein's book (see below) on the
Andrew Tool Kit.
- An improved collection of specialized text editors for C, Modula
2, Modula 3, Pascal and Lisp .
- The entire Andrew Message System including the remote message
server, a delivery system supporting multiple post office machines,
and white pages lookup.
- Support for IBM 3117 scanners.
- ODA support, including sample translators between ODA and Andrew,
from ODA to Interleaf and troff, and general tool kits for ODA and
raster applications.
This release contains Andrew materials developed elsewhere, including
materials from HP, Apollo, IBM, McDonnell Douglas, Interleaf, Northrop,
Wollongong and NYSER. If you have materials you would like us to
distribute with ATK, please let us know.
We routinely use this software at CMU. As a result, there are numerous
places in the system construction process where we assume that various
files, programs and machines are available. We attempted to remove all
of these dependencies in this release. If you find some CMU dependency
that we missed, please let us know. This release has been built on
Sun-3s, Sun-4s, Vaxes, PMaxes and HP's AUX. As of when we froze the
source for MIT there was a minor bug that interrupted the compile and
build on IBM RTs running AOS (BSD Unix) or AIX. The patch to fix this
will be posted soon. This and subsequent patches will be made available
as outlined below.
This release can be obtained in several ways. The entire X distribution
is available via anonymous ftp from the Internet host, expo.lcs.mit.edu
(Internet: 18.30.0.212). The sources for ATK, AMS and ODA are located
in the "andrew" tree, one of the contributed tool kits. Just the
"andrew" tree from the X distribution is available via anonymous ftp
from the Internet host, emsworth.andrew.cmu.edu (Internet:128.2.11.64).
Copies of the entire X distribution software can also be obtained, for
the nominal X11 distribution charge, by contacting:
MIT Software Distribution Center
Technology Licensing Office
Room E32-300
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
USA
+1-617-258-8330
We also distribute the following related materials:
The Andrew Project, a collection of technical papers in booklet
form, (available end of January).
Nathaniel S. Borenstein's book: Multimedia Applications Development
with the Andrew Toolkit (Prentice-Hall, available now).
Hardcopies of the documentation for ATK and AMS (available end of
January, about 3700 pages).
ODA Project Book: Multi-media Document Interchange: ODA and the
EXPRES Project (Springer Verlag, available in late Winter 90).
Introductory video tape: Welcome to Andrew: An Overview of the
Andrew System (available now).
Technical video tape: The Andrew Project: A Session at the Winter
1988 Usenix Conference (available now).
More information about these materials is available from:
Information Requests
Information Technology Center
Carnegie Mellon University
4910 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
USA
phone: +1-412-268-6700
fax: +1-412-268-6787
info-andrew-request@andrew.cmu.edu
We plan to provide updates to the Andrew software as necessary. These
will be distributed as patches (for use with the patch program
distributed as part of the X tape). We will put these patches on both
expo (in /contrib/andrew/patches) and emsworth (in /patches). In
addition, emsworth will contain three complete distributions: a
compressed tar file of the sources on the X.V11R4 tape, a compressed tar
file of the sources with all patches applied, and a complete source tree
with all patches applied. Therefore, one can retrieve the desired patch
files, the latest version of the software, or the latest version of any
specific file. These files can be retrieved by anonymous FTP or by mail.
For more information on mail retrieval of information, send a (blank)
piece of mail to
andrew-service@andrew.cmu.edu
The info-andrew unmoderated distribution list contains informal
conversations between Andrew users and developers. Send mail to
info-andrew-request@andrew.cmu.edu to be added to the Andrew mailing
list (or to request any other service that we provide, like hard copy
documentation or redistribution of contributed materials). The
info-andrew-bugs@andrew.cmu.edu address provides an easy method for
reporting bugs in the software to members of the ITC (it is not a public
distribution list).
There is also a netnews distribution list, called comp.soft-sys.andrew,
which is identical to the info-andrew distribution list except that it
does not support the multi-media capabilities of info-andrew.
Finally, there is an andrew-demos mailing list to which interesting
ATK/Messages demos are sometimes posted (you must have AMS running to
see the demos). To subscribe, send mail to
andrew-demos-request@andrew.cmu.edu.