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From: rick@pbi.COM (Richard M. Goldstein)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re:  Xview - what do you think?
Message-ID: <9102131701.AA07107@marvin.pbi.com>
Date: 13 Feb 91 17:01:36 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 83




Tom-

i've been around XView since the 0.6alpha (i believe there
were about 15 copies distributed) and, moving from SunView,
my experiences have been positive. 

As far as performance, i am continually impressed how much i 
can get away with in an event callback without noticeably impeding 
performance, and i'm running on a Sparcstation 1 (or, as i say, 
Sparc Classic).  i believe that the xview people actually
have a benchmark utility they develop with.

i find the attribute/value-pair api to be convenient, and, i
dare say, more clean than the Xt code i've seen (not being
an Xt programmer myself).  Also, XView in some cases enforces 
OL spec, which you may consider a feature (me) or a hindrance (my boss).
In other words, the XView philosophy of not being able to change the 
font in panel-items, for example, is a feature.  i've seen people
on xpert griping about this, however.

DevGuide is Sun's inexpensive and mandatory interface editor
which generates in intermediate format that can then be
converted to C, or C++ (and maybe more someday).  the resulting
code takes advantage of XView's object oriented features and,
hence, is handy to work with.


there are, of course, some shortcomings of XView2.0 (some of 
which, i hope, will be addressed in the next release):

Most notable is extensibility.  i want to be able to write 
reusable conglomerations of objects and use the convenient
attribute-value interface to them.  i have not found the 
current extension mechanisms to be sufficient for what i
want to do.  (why do i see C++ in my future?...).  for example,
can go into DevGuide and punch out an OL "stock" command popup.
i'd like to be able to make an "extension" out of this.  (if 
you're a dreamer like me, you may also like a mechanism to have 
DevGuide recognize this "extension" and be able to read it in 
and use it as any other XView object).

i also find that the colormap situation with xview2.0 is not
sufficient for imaging applications (using either xview's 
color model or Xlib colormaps with xview seems to cause
problems - or maybe i'm unable to figure it out; as my
byline says...).

One thing we had to abandon is trying to use Xlib windows
in XView Canvases (this may be an odd thing to want to do anyway,
but it was fun to try).  the xview notifier filters events to give
them a SunView look-and-feel; this makes it difficult to interact
with the straight-up X.

On DevGuide, i must mention that it doesn't take advantage of
all the possible XView attributes.  this is occasionally problematic
when i want something that is a "create only" attribute and DevGuide
won't generate it.  I'd like to see an "advanced properties" sheet 
or something :-)

finally, there is only one book of documentation available for XView.
it is bad as far as it goes, but...  Really, see a need for
a reference volume dedicated to a ***complete*** and ***accurate***
description of ***all*** the attributes and macros available.


rick w/disclaimer 


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