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From: rlh2@ukc.ac.uk (Richard Hesketh)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x.motif
Subject: Re: Review of TeleUSE
Message-ID: <5559@harrier.ukc.ac.uk>
Date: 28 Sep 90 09:44:43 GMT
References: <1990Sep24.163032.3930@uunet!ibism!postmaster>
Reply-To: rlh2@ukc.ac.uk (Richard Hesketh)
Organization: Computing Lab, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.
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In article <1990Sep24.163032.3930@uunet!ibism!postmaster> lcp@uunet!ibism!postmaster (Larry Poleshuck) writes:
>There has been some discussion about X-builders and development environments
>for Motif.  I'd like to share some of my investigations and experiences.

>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.

I'm probably jumping the gun on this one, but I am currently alpha testing my
own UI Builder which has been designed to support any Xt Intrinsics based
Widget Set.  I intend making it freely available to anyone with ftp access
sometime before the end of the year.  Anyway, I have heard conflicting
reports about TeleUSE but no specific technicalities.

>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.

I believe Apollo/HP's Open Dialogue (which is more of a UIMS than a builder)
has a similar concept to templates (infact they are also called templates).
Its been around in various forms for about 5 (?) years.
I use templates in my builder as well.  The only difference between mine and
TeleUSE appears to be the idea that if you change the original template all
the copies are changed.  My templates are infact just collections of Widgets
instances that have had their attributes set to certain values.  When a copy
of a template object is made, you get a completely independent copy; changes
to the original does not affect the copies.

I find this useful for both object re-use and for use as "scratch" areas to
perform prototyping experiments.

>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).

I have this as well.   The interface you are building is always on the screen
and you can interact with it as well as edit it.  There is no edit/run mode,
just one interactive one 8-).  There is a separate tree
heirarchy (currently displayed as an indented list of names) which can be
selected to edit objects or objects can be PICKed directly from the screen.

>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.

My builder does not support any programming constructs apart from editing
translation tables and callback lists.  It uses the Widget Creation Library
to implement the created interface (the UI is generated as a Resource file
and a some bootstrapping C code), therefore it generates very little
traditional C code.  The widgets can be manipulated using Wc actions and
callbacks or in C directly from the widget id.s that are automatically created.

I've toyed with the idea of incorporating a C interpreter to allow
development of application specific callbacks and actions.  This requires
quite a bit of work though and I haven't the time.  The UIMX builder
incorporates a C interpreter I believe.

Mine would certainly be better with some form of programming but I would like
to incorporate a constraint language similar to the one used in Serpent. However
the Xt Toolkit currently does not have the level of support for constrained
objects that is really needed and I don't have the time to write it.
This level would include all graphical objects; arcs, rectangles, filled
polygons, lines, arrows.  These objects would be constrained to each other
using extremely simple mathematical or symbolic constraints.  It would be up to
the toolkit to enforce these constraints.

Even without a specific interface language my builder can produce more than
just static interface layouts.  The Widget Creation Library includes a set of
general actions and callbacks that can be used whilst developing the
interface to implement typical dynamic behaviour.

The interface to the builder was built mostly with itself, which seems to be a
common test these days for builders.

>Another e.g.  To pop up a dialog box:
>
>    ui->myWindow->myHelpDialog.Unmanaged := false;

In Xt (and probably Xm 1.1) you only need one two lines of C code to
extract a piece of data from an object:

	String text;

	XtVaGetValues(text_widget, XtNstring, &text, NULL);

or one line to popup a dialog box:

	XtPopup(myHelpDialog, XtGrabNone);

I don't know about UIL, I looked at it once, barfed and then went off and
wrote an interactive UI Builder 8-).

>Larry Poleshuck
>Citibank
>111 Wall Street

My builder currently supports the Athena Widget Set, the 2-D HP Widget Set
and my Widget Set.  The only reason it does not yet support Motif is that I
haven't got Motif yet.  I hope that by the time it is publically released I
will have folded the Motif Widgets into it.

Richard Hesketh   :   @nsfnet-relay.ac.uk:rlh2@ukc.ac.uk
		  :   rlh2@ukc.ac.uk    ..!mcsun!ukc!rlh2
---                                               
Computing Lab., University of Kent at Canterbury,
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