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From: nazgul@alfalfa.com (Kee Hinckley)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x.motif
Subject: Re: XVT Programming (QUERY) (Was Re: Programming for Windows-3 AND Mac)
Message-ID: <910130193531.342@alphalpha>
Date: 31 Jan 91 00:35:31 GMT
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> In article <1991Jan14.211226.17872@isc.rit.edu> cms2839@isc.rit.edu (C.M. Stuntz ) writes:
> Can any one out there attest to their worth?  Has anyone had any
> experience with XVT?  I would like to know any problems with XVT to see
> if I can use it for cross platform development.  E-mail or post is fine.
> I will try to summarize what responces I get by e-mail.

For what it's worth they have a competitor now.  A company going
by God-awful name (although it was bound to happen eventually) of
"Open Inc.".

I haven't used XVT.  I have reviewed the manual extensively.  My
firm belief is that virtual toolkits are too limiting and that
any commercial app will have to bypass them at one point or another.
(A quick survey of about 17 of the apps on my Mac shows that only one
does not have some non-standard, application-specific interface object).
I do know that there is no way in hell I could have written Poste
(our email product) in XVT without going through to the Motif/Xt level.
Some of those cases would be due to dealing with Motif bugs/limitations,
others just a matter of trying to make the interface more usable; I'm
a firm believer in tuning each GUI interface individually.

XVT claims their toolkit is not a least common denominator solution.
They are partially correct.  What they've done is filled in a few
of the holes themselves.  However you are still abandoning full font
control, internationalization, all geometry management other than
bulletin boards (and thus you lose user-font control), and a number
of other features.  Furthermore, the pass through mode may allow you
to use missing primitive widgets (e.g. arrow button) however there
is no way to use composite widgets, since there is no way to create
XVT objects as children of those widgets.

All this said, if you can deal with those limitations, or if the
speed of porting is more important than the quality of each individual
interface, then as far as I can tell, XVT does work and can be used.
I don't know about Open Inc.'s toolkit.  I've asked them for an API
(I just spotted them at Uniforum last week), we'll see what they send.

						-kee