Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!wuarchive!texbell!nuchat!moray!siswat!buck
From: buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Graphics User Interfaces... standards?
Summary: check out Rochkind's XVT unified programming interface
Message-ID: <445@siswat.UUCP>
Date: 29 Aug 89 16:19:11 GMT
References: <5910@ficc.uu.net>
Organization: Photon Graphics,  Houston
Lines: 28

In article <5910@ficc.uu.net>, peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
> It's all very well to standardise the look-n-feel of man interface, but the
> important part is to standardise the programmer interface to window systems.
> Is anyone doing any real work on this?
> 
> Ideally, there should be some sort of high-level call standard that lets
> an application open a window, create buttons, text panes, menus, scroll-
> bars, and so on. To convert the program from Motif-style to OpenLook-
> style should just require setting some parameters... or at worst a
> recompilation.
> 
> Is anyone else working on something like this?

You might look up the recent paper by Marc Rochkind in the Usenix Summer '89
proceedings, "A Unified Programming Interface for Character-Based and
Graphical Window Systems."  It discusses his commercial product called
the Extensible Virtual Toolkit (XVT).  His goal was to create a smooth
migration path from character graphics to bitmapped screens, and the big
problem is that the entire programming model for the application changes.
XVT gives the GUI programming model for character displays, and supplies
an X implementation for when the client wishes to change to bitmap screens.
A side benefit of XVT is that one could relatively easily move to other
GUIs as needed.  (Only X is available now.)



-- 
A. Lester Buck		...!texbell!moray!siswat!buck