Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ibism!lcp
From: lcp@uunet!ibism!postmaster (Larry Poleshuck)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x.motif
Subject: Review of TeleUSE
Message-ID: <1990Sep24.163032.3930@uunet!ibism!postmaster>
Date: 24 Sep 90 16:30:32 GMT
Organization: Citibank
Lines: 87

There has been some discussion about X-builders and development environments
for Motif.  I'd like to share some of my investigations and experiences.

I have studied various development platforms for X-Window development.
In my personal opinion the best is TeleUSE.

The features of TeleUSE that put it ahead of the others are:

1)  It is more mature than any of the others.  Many of them are still in
beta;  we are currently on using the 1.1 of TeleUSE.

2)  It lets 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 the
widgets required to display a specific type of data.  This would consist of 
all of the text and label widgets, as well as the callbacks for 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.
To my knowledge 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 a nice convenience for a simple test application -- it is
almost essential for a large, complex application.  Again, none of the
other vendors have this feature yet (to my knowledge).

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.

Some people have mentioned the dialog language as one of the drawbacks to
TeleUSE.  To me, it is one of its strengths.  It is an object oriented language.
You can build your own types and define the methods using C code (which can
include embedded SQL or whatever file access you desire).  You can
then use your data types in simple D lines of code.  E.g.,

    t : myType;
    ui : wr;	    -- wr (widget rep) points to the top level shell

then

    ui->myDialog.value := t.name;
	    -- the widget with name myDialog is found and the
	    -- XmNvalue attribute is set to the name attribute of   
	    -- my user defined type.

Another e.g.  To pop up a dialog box:

    ui->myWindow->myHelpDialog.Unmanaged := false;

In practice, I think most of my complex applications will probably use
C and the TeleUSE run-time library because of the difficulty of accessing
my complex data types from D language.  However, D is an excellant tool
for prototyping an application.  When you've completed you prototype,
you can take the interface as is and add the necessary C code.

We are currently using TeleUSE to develop a medium sized user interface.
I will post more as I learn more about the pluses and minuses of this
product.

I would be interested to see other notes of this nature regarding
some of the alternatives.



Larry Poleshuck
Citibank
111 Wall Street
New York, NY  10043

Phone:  212-657-7709
Fax:    212-657-0068
E-Mail: uunet!ibism!lcp

-- 

Larry Poleshuck
Citibank
111 Wall Street