rick@hanauma (Richard Ottolini) (08/14/89)
An earlier poster wished that X-Windows had a graphical interface builder such as the one on the NeXT workstation. The answer is yes--- Several CASE booths at the San Jose Xhibition indicated they were designing such. Some comments: (1) Is such software commercially viable? Almost every year someone introduces a graphical interface builder for the Macintosh. The only ones that have prospered are those supported by the manufacturer itself--Apple--including ResEdit, the new MacApp View Edit, and HyperCard. The ratio of interface programmers to applications users is so tiny that CASE tools don't seem to be viable. NeXTStep will survive because it is manufacturer supported. Look for the same with X-Windows CASE tools. (2) Many of the X-Windows toolkits are already object-oriented to some degree even if they don't use an OOP language. This includes everything based on Xt, SunView, and InterViews. NeXT is completely OOP, which may be advantgeous. It also uses ObjectiveC that has runtime binding/linking. The advantage is that interface components can be tested and modified without linking or compiled the other parts of the program.