ericc@d.cs.okstate.edu (CLONINGER ERIC HEN) (01/02/91)
At the company I'm working for (TMS Inc.) we are in the midst of a development effort that involves XVT and I can provide quite a bit of opinion. At TMS, we provide a "limited" hypertext retrieval product that uses CD-ROM extensively. Nearly all of our software is presently intended for MS-Windows (phtew! spit! cough!) and is largely written in native Windows code. A client we are currently under contract with asked us to write our software for XVT so that it could be ported to another environment that supports XVT (not the Mac or OS/2). We've been developing the code under Windows and porting it to the new environment. Aside from some compiler specific problems and platform specific problems the development has gone "reasonably" well. I use the sarcastic form of reasonably because we've had problems that aren't necessarily XVT's problem (as an aside, it's easier to get legislation passed through Congress than getting Microsoft to admit that they have a problem with one of their development tools). Just for shits and grins, we had a part-time person with _limited_ experience with Think C port our app to the Mac with MPW C 3.0. He was finished the task in about a month and a half. There were some difficulties with the way the menu code worked, but the rest of the port was spent familiaring him with MPW. There are some problems with XVT, though (don't think that it is entirely bug-free). We've had _r_e_a_l_l_y_ bad support from GSS, the company that provides support for XVT. Don't believe their claims that you can write code that can be free from #defines. The only code that is free from #defines are the weak sample programs they provide you. From what I can judge from the 5 platforms our program runs on, XVT provides minimal functionality on some platforms and adds functionality to others. It is a meeting ground for all these platforms that I think degrades the appearance of the platforms that have a strong set of tools already (Mac, Windows). If you are writing an application just for the Mac, I think you'd be better off using native Toolbox calls (ditto with Windows). These are just opinions and treat them as such. If you have any specific questions about XVT, I'll gladly accept and return e-mail. Eric Cloninger Frustrated Pseudo Part Time Grad Student