UEJIOWH%ASLCLU.DECnet@CRDGW1.GE.COM (05/18/89)
Just read the message from Reha which stated that the switching from widget set s will be difficult. My experience has been from Athena to HP and am wondering if the above statement is true. We plan to switch to OSF Motif which is based on the HP and DEC Widget sets. How difficult is it to make this jump from the Athena or the public domain HP widget set? thanks, Wayne Uejio General Electric CRD KW-D252 P.O. Box 8 Schenectady, NY 12301 arpa:: uejiowh@ge.crd.com uunet: uunet!steinmetz!mohawk!whu
PJS@GROUCH.JPL.NASA.GOV (Peter Scott) (05/18/89)
UEJIOWH%ASLCLU.decnet@crdgw1.ge.com writes: >Just read the message from Reha which stated that the switching from widget >sets will be difficult. My experience has been from Athena to HP and >am wondering if the above statement is true. >We plan to switch to OSF Motif which is based on the HP and DEC Widget sets. >How difficult is it to make this jump from the Athena or the public domain >HP widget set? I haven't performed any switches myself so my information is second-hand. However, it is a concern of mine since it's a task I might very well have to perform in the future, depending on how tedious it is. At DECUS in Atlanta, I asked several people who had every right to answer the question accurately, how difficult it would be to switch between the DEC Widget set and any other widget set. The answer I got in each case was that it was at best non-trivial and at worst slower than re-coding from scratch. It was difficult enough that none of them had previously seriously considered doing it. Peter Scott (pjs@grouch.jpl.nasa.gov)
wescheng@hpccc.HP.COM (Wesley Cheng) (05/20/89)
> to perform in the future, depending on how tedious it is. At DECUS in > Atlanta, I asked several people who had every right to answer the > question accurately, how difficult it would be to switch between the DEC > Widget set and any other widget set. The answer I got in each case was > that it was at best non-trivial and at worst slower than re-coding from > scratch. It was difficult enough that none of them had previously seriously > considered doing it. The Athena, DEC and HP Widget Sets are all based on the Xt Intrinsics. The underlying Xlib, OO paradigm (creation/destruction of widgets, etc), translation management, do not change at all. My experience with Athena and HP widgets tells me that it might not be so bad. I think the trouble comes when we grow dependent on the behavior of certain widgets that do not exist in other widget sets. I have not found it very difficult to get the behavior I need by adding translations or writing my own widgets (once you write one, it's simple). The Motif widgets (DEC) provide a lot of functionality so it is unlikely one would need to write widgets for "standard" GUI functions. I believe that if the design is guided by the Xt Intrinsics, then switching would not be a major disaster. Many people will be switching to the Motif Widgets and I don't expect them to recode their applications from scratch (at least I don't intend to). wesley