JONESD@kcgl1.eng.ohio-state.edu (David Jones) (04/15/89)
I'm just getting started with X windows and just started reading this newsgroup. From reading the Ultrix X documentation it seems to me that this windowing system pretty much forces your application to adopt an object oriented programming style (OOPS). This is fine if you are starting from scratch and want to build an application with a snazzy user interface. There is a problem, however, in getting X to deal with the existing body of non-OOPS applications geared toward traditional computer graphics (i.e graphical display of data). The approach many people take is to use run these applications from a window which emulates an existing graphics terminal. I've noticed several requests in comp.windows.x for such emulators (BTW, anybody have an emulator for a Tektronix 4129 with parallel interface). Terminal emulators seem to me to be very inefficient, since every graphics operation requires encoding the operation to the protocol being emulated, passing the encoded data through a PTY, and then decoding it in order to map it to the appropriate X semantics. I'm interested to know if anyone has done any work to develop a more generic system, which I refer to as the X virtual graphics device. This virtual device would create a graphics window and present it to the application as the type of graphics workstation envisioned by the CORE and GKS standards. The virtual device would handle the X event queue and dealing with the window manager so the application would see a static display, locator, and keyboard. It would provide a simple and efficient interface to X display graphics while hiding the messy details of window managment (exposure, resizing, etc). Is PEX (Phigs Extension to X) what I'm looking for? David L. Jones | Phone: (614) 292-6929 Ohio State Unviversity | Internet: 1971 Neil Ave. Rm. 406 | jonesd@kcgl1.eng.ohio-state.edu Columbus, OH 43210 | jones-d@eng.ohio-state.edu Disclaimer: A repudiation of a claim.