mss+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Mark Steven Sherman) (05/31/87)
The other EXPRES award was let to CMU (primarily the Information Technology Center/Andrew Project). One major component of our system for EXPRES is the BE2 (Base Environment 2) "toolkit". You can think of its as an object-oriented version of the X Toolkit, though we think the pieces are bigger, e.g., one "object" that we provide with the system is a style-sheet oriented word processor. We are working on both the general architecture of the system and on specific, commonly used objects. Several applications have been built with the toolkit already, including the user visible part of Andrew's mail and bboard system, a shell interface, and a system monitoring tool. As might interest this list, we are in the process of adding support for X (version 11) into our system (one of our goals is transportability among Window systems and operating systems -- our first implementation was for Andrew's wm, we are in reasonable shape for X11 and we have other systems we would like to pursue.) Although we would like to have lots of people get as much information as possible, we don't have much up-to-date material to distribute -- the documentation is being rewritten and still needs a lot of work (there is a 2 inch stack of paper next to me with a note from one of the writers asking me to mark it up by last Friday), but I am willing to try general questions. As to the relationship between BE2 and Diamond, it is my personal understanding (which means I cannot quote an NSF position) that EXPRES wants to pursue the technology of document handling and one aspect of that technology is interchange between two different systems, and the two separately developed systems should be able to communicate with each other, e.g., we should be able to handle Diamond documents and Diamond should handle ours.