oj@apollo.HP.COM (Ellis Oliver Jones) (02/22/90)
Here is the statement which compares Open Dialogue with OSF/Motif as "officially" provided by the product marketing department. /Ollie Jones HP offers Open Dialogue 2.0 as a full user interface management system (UIMS) with dialog manager for developing OSF/Motif-style user interfaces. HP supports standards where they exist, and provides innovations where standards don't exist. HP markets both the OSF/Motif environment (as the standard) and the Open Dialogue user interface management system (as the innovation) for user interface development. Both the OSF/Motif toolkit and Open Dialogue 2.0 allow developers to create OSF/Motif style user interfaces for their applications. Open Dialogue based applications can run in an OSF/Motif user environment with mwm, the OSF/Motif Window Manager, or in other X Window System- based environments. The OSF/Motif environment is recommended for building user interfaces where the standard Motif style and toolkit API are required. Open Dialogue is recommended as an alternative to the OSF/Motif toolkit for user interface development when dialog management, an object-oriented development approach, alternative user interface styles, or non-C programming languages are desired. In order to determine whether to use OSF/Motif or Open Dialogue, it is best to determine which technology track the development team is on or moving toward. The OSF/Motif toolkit is best for developers who are comfortable with conventional toolkit programming environments based strictly on standards. The Open Dialogue UIMS is appropriate for those customers who are interested in a new object-oriented development paradigm, or the ability to distribute applications using a network computing model with the help of dialog management (see User Environment Technical Overview). In some cases, it may be appropriate for developers to use OSF/Motif now, and gradually migrate to object-oriented technology at some time in the future. In others, it may be best to start off with an object-oriented UIMS. Developers may use OSF/Motif for some projects and Open Dialogue for others. Users of applications built with Open Dialogue 2.0 and the OSF/Motif environment should not be able to identify substantial differences in appearance and behavior. From the end user's point of view, the strength of the OSF/Motif environment is its ability to establish a common Presentation-Manager-like style (appearance and behavior) across applications and across platforms. From the software developer's point of view, Open Dialogue offers the added benefit of architecturally separating the user interface (presentation) from the application functions (semantics). Although both products support the OSF/Motif appearance and behavior, the programming paradigms for creating a user interface differ.