mani@tridom.uucp (Mani Chawla) (04/22/91)
I would like to elicit feedback form the OpenLook Newsgroup concerning the toolkit choices for OpenLook compliant applications. The popular choices appear to be Sun's Xview and AT&T's OLIT and Xt+ toolkits. I have the impression that Xview is more widely used, and perhaps better supported. Is this simply a reflection of Sun's substantial market share, or is it the superior OpenLook toolkit? -- Mani Chawla mani%tridom.UUCP@mathcs.emory.edu
openlook-request@openlook (04/24/91)
> I would like to elicit feedback form the OpenLook Newsgroup concerning > the toolkit choices for OpenLook compliant applications. The popular > choices appear to be Sun's Xview and AT&T's OLIT and Xt+ toolkits. > I have the impression that Xview is more widely used, and perhaps better > supported. Don't forget TNT. Easily the most powerful OL toolkit. > Is this simply a reflection of Sun's substantial market share, or is it > the superior OpenLook toolkit? Lest we forget, XView can run on platforms other than Sun. As a consultant and instructor, I've found that my clients and students learn XView much faster than intrinsics-based toolkits. Since most of my clients have application programmers and not real systems types, the learning curve and ease-of-programming of XView is extremely attractive to them. As an exercise, teach an OLIT course to a group of application programmers and then teach an XView course... you'll understand. The clients that prefer OLIT over Xview prefer its flexibility and compliance with the intrinsics layer (its often perceived by managers who read things like PC Weak and InfoRag that the intrinsics layer is "standard" and everything else is not). Some others like OLIT becase subclassing in XView is awkward (its not hard, just awkward) and subclassing in OLIT is a bit better (neither is *real* good at it though). Sun's market share does have some bearing on these decisions just like Microsoft's market share has on PC programmers/managers, but not as overwhelming. FYI, there are other OL toolkits, but beware of ones that are not ICCCM compliant. Frank G. Consultant (my own opinions, of course)
grp@magpie.unify.com (Greg Pasquariello) (04/24/91)
Mani Chawla writes: > >I would like to elicit feedback form the OpenLook Newsgroup concerning >the toolkit choices for OpenLook compliant applications. The popular >choices appear to be Sun's Xview and AT&T's OLIT and Xt+ toolkits. >I have the impression that Xview is more widely used, and perhaps better >supported. > >Is this simply a reflection of Sun's substantial market share, or is it >the superior OpenLook toolkit? I think there is the _perception_ that XView is more widely used, but I'm not sure if that is really the case or not. If it is, then I see a few reasons why. In addition to those you mention above, XView is freely available, and is used by those who don't want to buy the libraries. Also, those that use Guide to develop their interfaces get XView code generated for them. We currently use OLIT. This makes it easiest for us to port our software to a Motif environment, because the general structure of applications is the same regardless of the widget set used. > > >-- Mani Chawla >mani%tridom.UUCP@mathcs.emory.edu --- Greg Pasquariello grp@unify.com Unify Corporation Be good and never poison people
devil@diablery.10A.com (Gil Tene) (04/29/91)
In article <vm0tvfu@openlook.Unify.Com>, grp@magpie.unify.com (Greg Pasquariello) writes: > I think there is the _perception_ that XView is more widely used, but I'm not > sure if that is really the case or not. If it is, then I see a few reasons > why. In addition to those you mention above, XView is freely available, and is > used by those who don't want to buy the libraries. Also, those that use Guide > to develop their interfaces get XView code generated for them. > . > . Don't forget, XView is VERY similar to SunView. Porting SunView apps to XView is MUCH easier than anything else. There are SO MANY SunView apps out there that XView gets a huge automatic start-up share. Being freely available (the only such OL toolkit I know of, or Motif for that matter :-)) helps alot too. XView is definitly less flexible and intrinsics-conformant than OLIT, but it conforms in (programming) style to SunView, which carries ALOT of weight. -- Gil. -------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Gil Tene "Some days it just dosn't pay - -- devil%imp@uunet.uu.net to go to sleep in the morning." - -- devil@diablery.10A.com - --------------------------------------------------------------------