palmer@fcs50b.UUCP (08/04/87)
What toolkits are people using out there? I need to make a decision regarding a toolkit and would appreciate hearing from toolkit builders and users. For builders: Will your toolkit be distributed with X11 in September? If not, when? What level of support do you provide? Does the X11 version have a substantially different programmer's interface compared to X10? For users: What are you using? What do you like/dislike about it? What CAN'T you do with it that you need to do? What have you tried and discarded and why? I'll be happy to compile a summary and post it.
mss+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Mark Steven Sherman) (08/05/87)
We at the ITC/CMU are building and using the BE2 (Base Environment II) toolkit, which is an object-oriented toolkit based on dataobjects, which hold state, and on views, which display state. We try to provide an architecture that makes object building straightforward. Our objects can be separately compiled and dynamically loaded -- very few "main" programs are ever written, we usually use our generic editor which can load in any object and hence can serve as many programs. Locally, there are "applications" being beta tested for text editing, help, h19 terminal emulation, system monitoring, and shell interaction (xterm equivalent). These applications will be the standard applications used by Andrew users on the CMU campus starting in the Fall. We also have several objects under development in various stages of completion, such as: a frame animator, a bitmap editor (MacPaint format compatible), a c-program text formatter, a foreign language text editor, an equation editor, a object-oriented graphics editor (we have three incomplete versions of this -- we'll choose one and finish it this fall!). How are we beta testing when X11 itself is unstable? One of our design goals is that we can run under several window systems, not just X, so the locally released version runs on Andrew's wm window manager. We have run the applications on the Alpha release of X11 and are in the process debugging X11 beta. We probably won't ship with the X tape. We hope to have a X11 shippable version by December, but if you want a copy of our stuff, let me know and I'll pass the word on. -Mark