taw@inf.rl.ac.uk (Trudy Watson) (11/03/89)
The organisation I work for, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, provides support for the UK academic engineering research community through a programme called EASE, the Engineering Applications Support Environment. As part of the programme of work, we will be evaluating toolkits available with the X window system over the next several months, with the objective of at least making some recommendations in the area. We envisage a two-stage process, with the first stage being mostly a paper exercise of collecting information and, hopefully, discarding some of the toolkits at an early stage of the evaluation. The second stage would involve a more extensive evaluation, including design and implementation of some "benchmark" exercises, principally aimed at finding out whether the toolkit in question will support a range of styles of interaction rather than prescribing one or a few. The list of toolkits we know about at present is as follows: Andrew ET++ Interviews Motif Open Dialogue Xt + Athena widgets Xt + Sony widgets Xt + Xcu Xt + HP widgets XUI XView ObjectWorks Are there any that we have missed? We are in the process of developing a number of evaluation criteria, and so far have come up with the following list: 1. Runs on X11 R3. 2. Available on MIPS, SPARC, 680x0 and VAX like architectures. 3. Already supported. 4. Usable - size, speed and styles of User Interface. 5. ICCCM conformant. 6. Supplier committed to maintenance. 7. Usable from C, not necessarily directly. 8. Affordable (for academics). Again, any comments on the above would be welcome. Further, any comments on the toolkits themselves would be welcome - both positive and negative. Please mail comments to me; a summary of the findings will be placed on the net after the exercise is over. It may need to be edited to remove any commercially sensitive information, of course. Please reply to: Trudy A Watson Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UUCP: ..!mcvax!ukc!rlinf!taw Chilton, Didcot, Oxon OX11 0QX, JANET: taw@uk.ac.rl.inf England.