Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!pasteur!agate!saturn!helios!sla
From: sla@helios (Steve Allen)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: porting of existing command-driven programs to X11
Summary: How can it be done with minimal rewrite?
Message-ID: <5640@saturn.ucsc.edu>
Date: 5 Dec 88 20:18:02 GMT
Sender: usenet@saturn.ucsc.edu
Reply-To: sla@helios.ucsc.edu (Steve Allen)
Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz;  UCO/Lick Observatory
Lines: 27


Are there any good references on porting of existing, command-driven
programs to X ?  We have a number of programs that produce graphical
output with which the user wants to interact.  Presently these programs
are command driven by the user.  This is quite different than the
event-oriented approach which X uses.

More specifically, we desire to be able to display an image and have a
running readout of data on that image as the mouse moves over it.  At the
same time, the program should still be involved in command interaction with
the user.  SunView provides for this by allowing the program to declare an
asynchronous routine which is called to handle mouse events, while the main
thread of the program continues unaware.

I can see how this could be accomplished in X by making an image-display
child process which would do all the X11 processing.  But this would
require either keeping separate copies of a potentially large image
in memory, or using a system-dependent means of sharing memory between
the parent and child processes.

Does one of the toolkits address this issue?  Has anybody else ported large
existing command-driven programs to X?  Please reply by e-mail.

Steve Allen
sla@helios.ucsc.edu
sla@ucscloa.bitnet
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