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From: nosmo@eiffel.UUCP (Vince Kraemer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel
Subject: Re: Good problems (and Eiffel 2.3)
Summary: other kits available
Message-ID: <397@eiffel.UUCP>
Date: 21 Aug 90 19:55:11 GMT
References: <104@alfrat.uucp> <2070@trlluna.trl.oz>
Organization: Interactive Software Engineering, Santa Barbara CA
Lines: 51

From article <2070@trlluna.trl.oz>, greg@trlamct.trl.oz.au (Greg Aumann):
>
>I consider that the lack of a good X windows user interface toolkit is,
>for me at least, one of the most serious deficiences of Eiffel and would be
>enough reason for me to use C++ on my next project despite the fact that I
>think Eiffel is a superior language.

There are two independently developed UI toolkits available: The
first is a Motif widget set encapsulation.  It requires that you have
the Motif widget set as part of your development environment.  The
toolkit comes as source, with some examples.  Since it is an
encapsulation, extendibility is limited.  This toolkit will be part of
the contributed software directory in the 2.3 release.

The second toolkit implements an OpenLook'ing interface.  It is written
from scratch (the Xlib) level.  It appears to be extensible, since so
much of it is written in Eiffel.  This toolkit has been written up in
a proceedings on the European Unix User's Group, in 1989 (or 90). (I can not
find my copy of it to give you all the details. I will keep looking).
According to Andrea Querci, this toolkit has been available since May
1990.

The Motif-based toolkit has been developed by:

Intelligent Visual Computing
P.O. Box 418
Morrisville, NC 27560
tel: 919-481-1353
fax: 919-467-3683

The OpenLook'ing toolkit is produced by:

Unirel
Centro Commerciale Osmannoro
Via Tevere, 14
50019 Sesto Florentino ITALY
tel: ++39-55-373043
fax: ++39-55-318525

(As an aside, to independent software developers: If you watch this NG
at all, you realize there is a great demand for class libraries in a
number of areas.  Many of these could be quite lucrative ventures which
ISE doesn't have the time or expertise to write quality class libraries
for.  By taking advantage of the C package options available, developers
could conceivably write a package of C callable routines - if worries of
having a limited market are slowing you down, maybe you should think
again.)

Vince Kraemer
ISE Tech. Support
(technical correspondence to: eiffel@eiffel.com)