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From: trevor@GRASP.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Trevor Darrell)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Toolkit for NeWS
Message-ID: <8710211435.AA23042@grasp.cis.upenn.edu>
Date: Wed, 21-Oct-87 12:13:43 EDT
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Posted: Wed Oct 21 12:13:43 1987
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   From: Andre Marquis <Bodick@cis.upenn.edu>
   I'm still wondering if there is going to be a standard user-interface
   (similar to SunView if need be) toolkit for NeWS.  I talked breifly with
   Saul Wold of Sun (I'm not sure what his position with them is.) and he
   indicated that there is nothing on the horizon.  Is this indicative of Sun's
   long term commitment to NeWS?

There *is* a framework for development of a standard user interface. In
case you haven't read the NeWS manual yet, it is collectively contained
in liteUI, litewin, litemenu, and liteitem. Since I began programming
in NeWS I am constantly impressed at the elegance and efficiency
of providing a class based "toolkit". To be sure the lite*.ps packages
are not complete, and perhaps not standardized yet, which is *why* they
are called `lite' (tastes great, less filling.) But X11 is far from
being stable yet, (if you read XPERT), and all my colleagues who
have tried writing X10.4 code using a toolkit have come away frustrated.

   >From the dearth of replies to my image queries, I'm assuming the user
   community is as apathetic toward NeWS as I am acerbic.  Sun is right out.

   DEC and HP have signaled their commitment to X by developing C based
   toolkits.  They are public domain.  How does Sun expect NeWS to "win"
   without an analogous product?


In the future don't waste the time and energy of the people on this
list with this sort of "but X will win over NeWS" flame-bait. If you
enjoy programming in X, fine, you are more than welcome to continue.

One note of interest- According to yesterdays announced Sun/AT&T agreement,
NeWS/X.11 will become a part of standard Unix.


Trevor Darrell
trevor@grasp.cis.upenn.edu

CIS Research Computing, U. of Penn.