mayer@hplabs.hpl.hp.com (Niels Mayer) (05/24/91)
(Note: this is a contination of my belated reply to a message posted on comp.lang.lisp.x) > From: sane@cs.uiuc.edu (Aamod Sane) > Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp.x > > I would like to get an overview of what winterp provides and how > people have used it. > With respect to how people have used WINTERP -- I can only speak for the projects that I'm familiar with. Maybe others can post how they are using WINTERP (to winterp@hplnpm.hpl.hp.com, motif@alphalpha.com, xpert@expo.lcs.mit.edu, or comp.lang.lisp.x). Here are the projects I know of at HP Labs that are using WINTERP (there are other users of WINTERP at HP as well, but I don't know any particulars on how they're using WINTERP): * At HP Labs, we are using WINTERP as prototyping/development, and extension platform in our STRUDEL groupware system. This system allows the use of semi-structured and active e-mail messages in order to make computer-based conversations easier to track, cross-reference, and integrate with calendaring and tasking tools. E-mail sent from a Strudel mail-agent may be received by a Strudel system, and the message will appear as "form" containing context-sensitive text-fields, text-editors, and active portions (e.g. pushbuttons). The forms are created on-the-fly out of Motif widgets; the widgets are created via WINTERP and a Winterp-Lisp "script" associated with a particular conversation or task type. The language-based, interpretive nature of WINTERP is central to the architecture of STRUDEL, in that the set of mail-forms and conversation-structures that can be handled by STRUDEL are described in an extensible library of Winterp-Lisp "scripts". For details, see "Strudel -- An extensible conversation toolkit" by Allan Shepherd, Niels Mayer, and Allan Kuchinsky in the proceedings of 1990 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. * At HP Labs, we are using WINTERP as prototyping/development environment for our work in audio/video multimedia. The multimedia device drivers and other low-level control systems are written in C, accessible via Winterp-Lisp primitives. Therefore, Winterp-Lisp may be used to interactively and programmatically control the devices. Higher-level interfaces allow creation of multimedia applications that are controlled via a WINTERP-driven GUI. I don't know how much more I am allowed to say about the project. The best I can do is refer you to an external publication -- see section 4 "The Future System: Multimedia Mednet" of the paper "The Multi-Media Medical Monitoring, Diagnosis, and Consultation Project" by Robert Sclabassi (Univ. Pittsburgh Neurosurgery, Electrical Engineering and Behavioral Neuroscience), Robert Leichner (HP Labs), Allan Kuchinsky (HP Labs), Donald Krieger (Univ. Pittsburgh), and Frank Prince (HP/Apollo)... in the proceedings of the 1991 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. * At HP Labs: Use of WINTERP as the UI-front-end in a team-programming-environment project. Again, I don't know how much I can say about this, and I don't know of any external publications. * Use of WINTERP in an internal product that will be widely deployed within HP. WINTERP was used both for prototyping, and will be used as an extension language for customizing the UI and functionality of the delivered application. (Don't know how much I can say about this -- if the folks at HP WRC want to speak up about this, I'll let them do it themselves...) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Niels Mayer -- hplabs!mayer -- mayer@hplabs.hp.com Human-Computer Interaction Department Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Palo Alto, CA. *