Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!m2c!ulowell!masscomp!rtc
From: rtc@masscomp.UUCP (Richard Carling)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Anyone working on UIMS?
Message-ID: <116@masscomp.UUCP>
Date: 5 Apr 88 19:46:01 GMT
References: <4627@eagle.ukc.ac.uk> <4704@eagle.ukc.ac.uk>
Reply-To: rtc@masscomp.UUCP (Richard Carling)
Followup-To: comp.windows.x
Organization: MASSCOMP - Westford, Ma
Lines: 132
Keywords: user-interface UIMS toolkit

>In article <4627@eagle.ukc.ac.uk> rjf@ukc.ac.uk (I) wrote:
>
>[ asking if anyone was working on UIMS on top of X, and promising to
>  summarise replies ]

Sorry for the late reply but our news system has been
a little flakely for the last few weeks, so I didn't have
a chance to reply to the message about UIMS's for the XToolkit.

At MASSCOMP I have been working on building some UIMS extensions
for the XToolkit and am contributing the initial efforts to the public
domain in the hopes that at least some of these techniques
will become part of the XToolkit standard, as it evolves.
These extensions work directly with the XToolkit and do not
require C++, Lisp or extensive amounts of additional code (and memory)
to be used. 

I presented a paper at the X Window Conference at MIT this January
on the design for the UIMS layer. The talk was titled
"Pickling and Embellishing Widgets". I have placed some widgets
which use these techniques (label, command and obedient) and some
XToolkit extensions which make this possible on the X11 R2 tape.
Since we don't have our tape yet, I don't know the exact directory,
I assume in the "contribution" section somewhere. (and there is
one small change which must be made to the code, which I will send
out once I have the version from the tape). The applications on
the tape primarily "demonstrate" our techniques.

I had hoped to have a simple WYSIWYG interactive editor finsihed
in time for release on the tape, but it is not complete yet
(but then I haven't gotten my tape either!).
The editor will be made available on one of the MIT machines
in April (or early May at the latest). The editor will make the
software provided MUCH more useful and provide more of our design
strategy for a more complete UIMS system (The editor is almost ready).

What it doesn't do:

There are other issues like additonal constraint handling between
widgets (as an example, arrows between widget boxes on a flow chart,
when a widget is moved, the arrows should be smart enough to follow)
and high level dialogue management which this level of UIMS and the
current XToolkit does not address. Also, at this time we are not planning
to provide any new widgets, just modify or rewrite some of those
currently available.

What it does do:

The WYSIWYG editor lets users create the user interface interactively.
The user interface is stored as (pickled) data on disk and then loaded
by the application at run time (unpickled). The design also allows adding
arbitrary graphical detail (embellishments) to the widgets from the
widget editor. All of this allows widget developers to concentrate
on a set of core or generic widgets which can have arbitrary graphical
detail but provide a set of consistant semantics.

  The graphics of the widgets is not coded directly into the widget
(as in the current widgets provided in the XToolkit) but kept as separate
data in displaylists. This allows great flexibility in the widgets
graphical representation and even allows different widget states to have
(greatly) different visual representations, when desired. Since the
graphical representation is symbolic, the interactive editor can provide
a great deal of control over adding and editing the graphic embellishments.

The supporting code to provide these capabilites is relatively small
and designed to work directly with the XToolkit, it is not a bulky
layer designed to handle everything, and it is very easily extensible.

And as part of the XToolkit strategy, this is all designed to be
"Policy Free". Applications and specialized widgets should implement
policy, NOT the underlying tools (as Smokey Wallace would say).
(Also, we don't want to be sued by those friendly folks at Apple)

So...
   I plan to have an interactive widget editor available
thru MIT shortly. This will be simple, but usable, and will provide
the major missing capability from whats currently been provided by us
on the X11 R2 tape. Two simple applications should already be on the
X11 R2 tape demonstrating loading of ascii descriptions of the
user interface as well as the use of graphical embellishments and
how the graphical extension mechanism works. There should be
some rough documentation in the directory along with the code.

If this style of widget representation and graphical extensibility
becomes popular or desired by the X Window Community, then
additional support may be provided. A major improvement would be the
use of a binary representation on disk for the user interface, so that
start up time of the application would be faster (currently we are
only supporting the ascii representation, which is of more
value without a widget editor available and is easier to
understand). Also, output widgets for various types of plotting
would be nice, with standardized interfaces for use by applications.
But this is crystal ball stuff for now.

I hope that in future releases of the XToolkit, integration of the
the various XToolkit compatible contributions from the various
companies can be made, so that a more robust and complete UIMS layer
will be available. Hopefully this will evolve over time and will
(perhaps) be a goal of the MIT Consortium.

Even without additional support beyond providing a simple widget
editor, we believe these techniques greatly enhance the ability
to design complex user interfaces with lots of graphical
detail using the XToolkit (something not otherwise easily possible
without writing a bunch of specialized widgets), and provide
companies with an easy way to design their own particular visual
style for user interfaces (and this design is more flexible then
just using an image for the visual representations).

Don't get your hopes too high, the editor won't be a finsihed
polished product providing complete control of everything imaginable,
but we hope it will provide enough functionality to show the
value of using the techniques we are providing (and it is WYSIWYG)
And this version will just work with the simple widgets Label, Command
and Obedient for now, although adding new widgets should not be
a very difficult task.

( I also threw in a document for some modifications to the intrinsics
  which provide running the toolkit from within an X window, assuming
  the intrinsics have not changed to greatly from the December level 5
  release, and a few other simple but useful changes ).

Questions, Interests, etc...

Richard Carling
...!decvax!masscomp!rtc

MASSCOMP
One Technology Way
Westford Mass. 01886 

617/692-6200 ext. 2302