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From: papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: GUI Portability: Say MOTIF
Message-ID: <20214@usc.edu>
Date: 30 Sep 89 05:11:25 GMT
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Organization: Felsina Software, Los Angeles, CA
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In article <1261@quintus.UUCP> pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) writes:
>In article <20034@usc.edu> papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa) writes:
>>>In article <1256@quintus.UUCP> pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) writes:
>>>>But I don't think you want a Motif programmer interface.  The Amiga's
			^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>>>libraries are lean, clean, and fast.  The X toolkit, on which Motif is
>>>>built, is not.			      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You seem to be confused. What yuo call the X Toolkit is actually the "Athena
Widget Set". Motif is NOT built on top of the X Toolkit, but on the 
X Intrinsics, the lowest common interface to all toolkits (Motif, Andrew, 
HP, ATT OpenLook, etc...).

>>How do you know? Have you tried it?

>Yes.  I was careful to specify Xtk, and not Motif, in my criticism.  

Ho yea, reread the first sentence above then for your enlightnment :-)

>I don't know much about Motif, 

That shows ... :-)

>but I worked closely with Xtk long enough
        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>to recognize a kludge.  It is extremely complicated, and huge.  For
>example, xclock, by no means a full-featured clock program, is 278528
>bytes compiled for a sun3.  

Ever heard of virtual memory? For UNIX that doesn't really matter.

>Programming with Xtk is not particularly
>easy, and writing widgets is downright painful (I haven't done it, but
						   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
You've "worked closely with Xtk", but you "haven't done it [writing widgets]"?

>I've looked at the code for a few "simple" widgets).

Figures. You've never DONE it, but you go around telling people that it 
sure must be diffucult. Maybe you're just a bad programmer :-)

>As for performance, what hardware are you using?  Xtk takes the rather
>bizzare step of making each widget its own window.  This means when you
>create a dialog with 10 buttons in it, you are creating at least 11
>windows.  Yes, I know Motif has what it calls gadgets, which don't have
>associated windows, but I understand they are not "mouseable," so can't
>be used for buttons.

I am using Suns. MicroVaxes and IBM workstations. BUT, I have seen first 
glance Dale Luck's implementation of X running on an Amiga. Toolkit
programs run just fine as far as performance is concerned. In fact, Dale
used to demo his system by running the programs on the Sun and displaying
the output with the Amiga X server. He has since converted to "native X"
development also on the Amiga. Also Dale is said to be working on an Amiga 
shared X library, which will solve the program size on a non-virtual memory 
machine like the Amiga.

>It would be nice to have a "standard" interface sometimes, though it
>does tend to preclude innovation in interfaces.  When did you last see a
>pie menu on a Mac?

I haven't seen any "innovation" in interfaces as far as Amiga programs are
concerned. I've only seen a miriad of different user interfaces: each program
has its own.  Fortunately, Mr. Copperman, the new Commodore President, seems
to have understood my argument.

>A more interesting question to me is portability.  I'd like to be able
>to write applications that run on my Amiga at home and my Sun at work.
>But I don't think Motif is a good way to achieve that, for all the
>reasons I've mentioned, and some I haven't.

And there is where you show lack of imformation. You can forget about 
"portability" of AmigaDOS/Intuition programs to a Sun or such workstation.
You can have X on the Amiga, Sun, IBM, Mac, etc... TODAY and run the same
application on the Amiga at home and on your Sun at work. As far as Motif
is concerned, binary licenses are only $40, and in most cases vendors will
bundle it with their X software or hardware platform.

Take a second look, buddy.

-- Marco Papa 'Doc'
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