marti@ethz.UUCP (Robert Marti) (09/20/89)
SunView programs use the so-called Notifier which wants to be informed about all sorts of events besides the window-related ones, eg., signals, file descriptors ready for reading, and so on. As a result, there is an entire section of dos and donts for SunView programs in the SunView Programmer's Guide. This state of affairs is annoying when you want to build a nice user-interface on top of someone elses code and that code just happens to violate some of the rules imposed by the presence of the Notifier. Since the programmers' interface to XView is modeled after the SunView interface, I fear the same (or similar) restrictions apply for XView applications. Is this assumption correct? -- Robert Marti Phone: +41 1 256 52 36 Institut fur Informationssysteme ETH-Zentrum CSNET/ARPA: marti%inf.ethz.ch@relay.cs.net CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland UUCP: ...uunet!mcvax!ethz!marti
stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.COM (Dick St.Peters) (09/21/89)
mcsun!cernvax!ethz!marti@uunet.uu.net (Robert Marti) writes: > SunView programs use the so-called Notifier which wants to be informed > about all sorts of events besides the window-related ones, eg., signals, > file descriptors ready for reading, and so on. As a result, there is > an entire section of dos and donts for SunView programs in the SunView > Programmer's Guide. This state of affairs is annoying when you want to > build a nice user-interface on top of someone elses code and that code > just happens to violate some of the rules imposed by the presence of > the Notifier. The original release of SunView several years ago did specify a large number of donts. However, over the years SunView has evolved, and most of the donts have disappeared. For example, you can now do select()'s on your descriptors while the Notifier does select()'s on its descriptors. They've also provided a specific hook for attaching a SunView interface to existing code. These improvements are part of XView. Having logically simultaneous select()'s is almost certainly why XView has its own select() and uses syscall(), as someone recently complained about. These newer SunView features also make things like journalling easy - I have a journalling shelltool written in SunView. As soon as I have a good excuse, I plan to convert it to XView. -- Dick St.Peters, GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com uunet!dawn.crd.ge.com!stpeters