scp@sfi.santafe.edu ("Stephen C. Pope") (03/08/89)
Hi! As I'm new to the mailing list, I hope I'm not asking the *dumbest* question possible, but has anyone yet "ported" InterViews to run under NeWS instead of X? We're involved in developing a rather large application utilizing window-based interactive menus and graphical output. Some rough NeWS code is already in place. However, we would like to move our code to a wide variety of machines, many of which do not run NeWS. In order to keep the development work to a minimum, we'd like to hide the window system behind an interface such as InterViews providing the usual windows/Scenes, Items/Interactors. We are not looking for an exact duplication of X-styled InterViews under NeWS, but rather a "functional equivalent" - one way of getting stuff on the screen regardless of the underlying window system, so we can stop worrying about the window system we're running under. Although I'm little familiar with InterViews/X, I do recognize that the event handling is quite different than in NeWS. It does appear that with a thin layer between InterViews and the client code, one can completely hide events from the client, and replace it with a psuedo-stream communications interface. Thanks, Stephen C. Pope The Santa Fe Institute scp@santafe.edu
ramani@PATIENCE.STANFORD.EDU (Ramani Pichumani) (03/08/89)
> Hi! As I'm new to the mailing list, I hope I'm not asking > the *dumbest* question possible, but has anyone yet > "ported" InterViews to run under NeWS instead of X? I went to a demonstration of InterViews given last year by Mark Linton (its creator) and he mentioned that someone had ported InterViews to NeWS but didn't say who. What I would suggest you do is send him e-mail (linton@lurch.stanford.edu) and ask him for the latest details. Ramani
janssen@titan.sw.mcc.com (Bill Janssen) (03/08/89)
InterViews is a very nice system, but it is still just getting started. I would suggest porting the Andrew Toolkit to NeWS, and using that. Andrew is a system from the Information Technology Center at CMU, distributed free by IBM and CMU, on the X11R3 tape. It is an extensive object-oriented system with hundreds of useful classes (including major applications such as a mail system, a multi-media extensible editor, a typescript, a graphical workstation monitor-console, a help tool) that is based on a good model of a virtual window system, along with two ports to real window systems, WM and X11. All applications talk in terms of the virtual window system, so that different window systems can be used by the same application. Code can be dynamically loaded, so that the appropriate window system class can be selected at run-time. You would have to provide the port to NeWS, but it would be a minor job compared to the wealth of ready tools you would receive. The sources for Andrew are distributed on the X11R3 tape under contrib/toolkits/andrew. You might want to join the mailing list "info-andrew@andrew.cmu.edu" for more information (requests to "info-andrew-request@andrew.cmu.edu"), or try sending mail to ???? (perhaps postmaster@andrew.cmu.edu?). Bill