adoyle@bbn.com (Allan Doyle) (03/26/91)
A week or so ago, I asked for comments regarding Telesoft's TeleUSE Motif environment builder package. There were a lot of respondents so I believe a public summary is in order. Names have been removed to protect the innocent. >We just saw a two hour demo of Telesoft's TeleUse User Interface >Builder/Compiler/Does Everything For You product. >Does anyone out there use it? Would you be willing to share your >experiences? If there is interest, I'll summarize to the net >(your submissions will remain anonymous). ======================================================================== Date: 18 Mar 91 23:42:18 EST (Mon) I have their demo. 1) It was not as intuitive to me to use as Builder Xcessory (the only other demo I received). 2) The demo tended to eat itself. Makes me wonder about their product. 3) I don't want to have to learn yet more languages. I'd go to Wcl first - I may, anyway! 4) Their tech guy I spoke with seemed really on top of it, and was quite helpful. We bought Builder Xcessory because of 1) all output is UIL or C/Motif - portable. 2) ease of use 3) compatibility with other window managers, etc 4) price ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 Mar 91 09:01:05 PST I use TeleUSE, although I don't recommend it for my kind of work. We do a lot of prototyping and we send things out to the field to get the user's response (Navy work), where we make changes and additions on the fly. TeleUSE is great for development, INITIALLY! It should only be used for turn-key systems. Just keep in mind that it's a licensed product. That costs you every year or so. AND, if you want to use it somewhere else, e.g., a user's site, or another branch office, you have to license the product for that machine. It just doesn't work well in my kind of environment. Your much better off using a code generator like xbuild, Builder Xcessory, or that UIXS (or whatever). With these, you can build the windows and then manually edit the source code, WHEREVER and WHENEVER, if necessary. TeleUSE requires use of its runtime libraries. And it doesn't generate C and X-Windows standard code. But if your building turn-key systems, its great. anonymously yours, ======================================================================== [ There's one in every crowd ;-> Well this is exactly why I am posting this ] Date: Tue, 19 Mar 91 17:26:16 MES i am interested. if i'm the only one, send me email, please. ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 Mar 91 15:47:37 EST Allan: With all the usual disclaimers related to free advice, here goes: I put together a S/W group for a startup that was building a sophisticated direct manipulation interface for a debugger for In-Circuit-Emulators. We were developing the product simultaneously in MS Windows and Motif. We did a side by side of 5 layout editors for Motif. These included: TeleUse (from TeleSoft) BulderXcessory (from ICS) UIMX (A small company in Toronto licenses this to HP and IBM) ??? from Nixdorf (I forget the name) VUIT from Digital We used TeleUse for a month, returned it for a refund, and successfully completed the Motif product with BuilderXcessory in a very short period of time (3 months). Some comments: TeleUse: 1) They have their own language for callbacks, "D". Potentially powerful, but you need to retrain your engineers to learn yet another language. And it's not portable. You need to compile down D for every box you want to run your code on. 2) They did not support UIL. They had their own non-standard, non-portable declarative language. 3) Their user interface was, while not user hostile, certainly not intuitive. They committed some cardinal sins, like operations being context specific (the same user action meant one thing in one place, something else elsewhere). I would have thought that a product whose market is engineers building user interfaces would have taken extra care in building their own user interface. It really made me question the whole endeavor, or at least the judgment of the designers. Destroyed any remaining feelings of confidence in the product. BuilderXcessory, was not perfect, e.g. at that time it didn't support all gadgets. But it had an intuitive drag and drop interface, wrote standard c, read and wrote standard UIL, and was about 1/3 the price of TeleUse. Plus it was from a company specializing in X and Motif, not a company where those things are a sidelight. I have just specified bx to be used in a new project. UIMX was a good tool, the main complaint we had was that there was no representation of the widget hierarchy. A manipulatable tree was one of the best features of TeleUse, and is also available with bx. This was about 9 months ago. VUIT was not yet in alpha so was not a serious contender. It *did* look like it would be very complete. It may be time to look into it again. The system from Nixdorf was written for their machines. The port to the Sun was buggy to the point of being unusable. We put it aside after three hours. P.S. The company hired a new head of marketing, they radically changed the product direction, most of the engineering staff has moved on, and the company is in the process of self-destructing. "There are 8 million stories in Silicon Valley, this is 7 million of them..." ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 Mar 91 18:38:50 EST Following is a posting I made many months ago. I have just looked it over and after 6 months application building experience I find it to be still accurate. Despite some bugs and support issues we have found it to be a true productivity enhancer. I looked at six different builders. The best that I've seen is TeleUSE, a product of TeleSoft which is a subsidiary of the Swedish telephone company. We have an evaluation copy running on the 14th floor and have had good experiences with it. The features of TeleUSE that put it ahead of the others are: 1) It is the only one that is a RELEASED product. We are currently using a Beta 1.1. None of the others have shipped a 1.0 yet. 2) It let's you build re-usable pieces of your applications. These are what they call templates -- sets of widgets which can be re-used. For example, we could build a set of templates which includes such things as a party field widget. This would consist of all of the fields required for a party, including callbacks for the edit-checks. Templates can be copied into new screens with the click of a button and then particular attributes can be over-riden. If a change to an attribute of the original template is made, that change is automatically carried forward to all inheritors of the template, without affecting any of the specifically over-riden attributes. This is feature is very useful for building large complex applications. None of the other builders have it. 3) It will display your application as a hiearchy tree. This allows an overall view of your entire application and gives the ability to make changes either from the graphical view, or the tree view. I found this to be an essential feature for a simple test application -- it would be even more important for a larger application. Again, none of the other vendors have this feature yet. 4) It has a dialog language that makes window development easier. The dialog language is an X window specific language that requires much less code to manipulate X widgets, compared with a C language/UIL interface. For example, to get the value of an XmText string widget in a C/UIL program requires four or five lines of code, but in the dialog language requires a single expression. 5) TeleUSE 1.1 has quite a few nice little productivity features, such as fast attribute menus, which allows modification of common attributes without pulling up the whole attribute form. Text and color manipulation is fast and easy. Potential drawback to TeleUSE: It's more expensive than any of the other builders. ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 20 Mar 91 16:01:26 +0100 We would appreciate it if you could send us a summary of the responses you receive. ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 20 Mar 91 10:32:18 -0500 what are you looking to implement. we used it for a UI prototype, and seriously considered it for use in our end product. i can elaborate in different areas. ------------------------------------------------------------------ [Here the respondent elaborates...] Date: Wed, 20 Mar 91 13:06:11 -0500 using teleuse incurs a good deal of overhead. they support their own language ('D'), support their own layout description language (.pcd files) require the use of their tools (UXB, vip). while all of these provide you with a great deal of UI power (prototyping and product development), they also require you to fit into their architecture and depend on their system. so, if the system you're building fits the architecture that they are providing, you're all set. but if not, you're in over your head. we evaluated teleuse for use in our product and found that it didn't fit our architecture. we used it to develop a prototype and found it quite powerful. we have since used Wcl to produce prototypes and found it much simpler. we have chosen to build on it for our product. i'm curious, what kind of product are you building. [Ha! No, actually I told him...] ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 20 Mar 91 17:08:22 EST We are using it and are pretty happy with it. I've been building all my windows using the VIP builder and I'm sure it's saved me lots of time. The ability to build a "template" and reuse it over and over has proven very useful. And combination of widgets can be a template, so I can define, say, a form containing pushbuttons and insert the template in any number of widgets. If I want to change something in all instances (like adding another button) all I do is add it to the template and viola! it shows up everywhere. It's also very good for making the windows attractive and balanced - you just move things around, change colors, etc. and see what you have immediately. We are also using their D language to do a lot of the window and callback management. It's a bit crippled in terms of programming with reasonable datastructures, but otherwise fine. Are there specific things you want to know about, or want to use it for? [After the next message is more info from this person in response to my reply to him] ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 20 Mar 91 18:33:40 PST Allan: We built a large piece of software with TeleUse - very dynamic interface with lots of widgets and lots of things happening. We now have a large piece of software which is a devil to port, whose Motif bug status is dependent on the version of Motif that TeleUse supports, which contains a lot of funny-looking 'D' language files, and which requires a host of support files just to run. TeleUse is a great protoyping tool, but in practical terms it just insinuates itself too deeply into the logic of the program, so that extracting it is nearly impossible. Living with it is nearly as bad, from the porting and maintaining point of view. I love the way it looks, and if you don't have to port the software it solves a lot of difficult problems easily. But, if you're building software to sell to someone else, avoid it, or use it for prototyping. Even for prototyping, we've found Wcl to be more useful, though it isn't WYSIWYG. ======================================================================== [The indented stuff is my reply to the guy two messages up] Date: Thu, 21 Mar 91 11:44:08 EST >> This is the kind of thing we're worried about. The hidden blemishes that they neglect to tell you about. Or the things that you only find out about when you try to get real serious about using the product. There has been nothing where we said "Oh Shit, I can't do <some thing> and that blows the whole design." And no matter what they say, there are no data structures other than lists. The other ones don't work. >> Are there specific things you want to know about, or want to use it for? >> - How hard is it to learn to use, how hard is the D language to learn? I mean really learn so that you feel comfortable using it. It's pretty simple. There is a very good tutorial that takes you through building a couple of windows and the C and D Code to support them. I had some problems with understanding some of the data types (Strings and StringLists and XmStringLists....) that I got help on from TeleSoft technical support. Any complicated data structs you are going to have to do in C (or C++ in our case) so it's mostly just the event/callback and widget management stuff you have to learn. I would say a good two weeks would be sufficient. That's ignoring learning the Motif Widget Set, which I am *still* figuring out. I plan on being embarrassed by my use of widgets on this project later in my career :) Our application is basically a top-down presentation of data, with the top level being the most general. So there is only one top-level window, from which can be expanded 10 windows (1 for each category), and so on. I wrote a semi-functional prototype in D, and we then used that as a framework to add in the C code. Worked out very well, with a lot of the D code still in place. - Did you evaluate anything else? Would you look at anything else if it came along? (No, I'm not doing market research on the fly, we're not developing a competing product...unless we don't find anything worthwhile and have to develop something in-house (sigh)) We wanted something that ran on Suns and wasn't vaporware. Last summer, when we were looking, there wasn`t really anything else. TeleUSE is expensive, but I would not hesitate to recommend it or to use it again. There's a guy here who's been writing UIL for another project on the VAXStations and has produced fewer, less appealing windows in the same time. And he's unhappy. I, on the other hand, smile a lot. Ever come to NYC? I don't think BBN is in competition with <censored>; if you want to see what it's like to use in the real world just let me know. [Nice guy, anybody out there in the Bahamas?] ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 21 Mar 91 22:44 MET Hi I read from net.news you have had the opportunity to evaluate TeleSoft's TeleUse. We weren't able to have them sell use a demo tape but think their tool is a bit expensive. What are your impressions/experiences ? We evaluated both Siemens-Nixdorf XBUILD and ICS XBUILDER and decided to use, for the moment, SNI's XBUILD because it' much cheaper, has better support and is available in source code. Thanks xxxx P.S. Please use the following email address: [Dear xxxx, your email address was garbled, I hope you see this] ======================================================================== Allan Doyle adoyle@bbn.com Bolt Beranek and Newman, Incorporated (617) 873-3398 10 Moulton Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
stefan@linkoping.telesoft.se (Stefan Ahlqvist) (05/30/91)
Two months ago there was a summary of comments about TeleUSE. I think most comments were quite adequate, but I wish to clarify some facts: > The company hired a new head of marketing, they radically changed the > product direction, most of the engineering staff has moved on, and the > company is in the process of self-destructing. Well, I know for sure that the engineering staff has NOT moved on (they're sitting is this very room right now, coding fervently, so I'm pretty sure...). Regarding product directions, Telesoft has always had a clear strategy for TeleUSE: First, to provide support for everything a developer might need. Then, to ensure that output quality is as good as if hand written After that, to further increase productivity and extend the support to closely related areas. This has been the strategy since the very start of TeleUSE, and it has not changed since. Nor is the talk about "self-destruction" true; I trust I am better informed than the person who wrote it. Most of the other negative comments was about the quality of TeleUSE- generated applications: - No support for UIL or C - Lots of "funny" (i.e. TeleUSE specific) files have to be shipped along with the TeleUSE application in order to make it work. - Sources not available to all parts of the generated application. All this is correct, BUT fortunately the next release (TeleUSE 2.0), due real soon now :-), particularly focuses on the output quality: + Generated output is C or UIL, optionally in combination with an Xresource file + Only the executable needs to be shipped. + All parts, needed to link the application (e.g. libraries), are provided in source format Other important improvements are: + Motif code detatched, so that you can always "plug in" the latest version yourself + Reworked user interface Stefan Ahlqvist TeleSOFT, Sweden