Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!columbia!cunixc!reha
From: reha@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu (Reha Elci)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Athena vs. Open Look vs. DEC Windows vs. Motif vs. PM ???
Message-ID: <1516@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu>
Date: 16 May 89 13:09:02 GMT
References: <24454@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: reha@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu (Reha Elci)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Columbia University
Lines: 43

In article <24454@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> andy@garnet.berkeley.edu (Andy Lieberman) writes:
>-- Which of these are actually available now?  How would I go about getting
>them?

 Athena and DECW are being used right now, Motif is kind of there but not
officially, I have seen a few copies out there... Why PM? To the best of 
my knowledge that will not run on the Sun anyhow.

Athena is public, DECW you have to buy from DEC and I have no idea what the
deal is to get MOTIF right now although a lot of people seem to have it
including all source code.
>
>-- I saw a chart in UnixWorld (Feb. 89) that showed Presentation Manager
>running on top of HP Widgets on top of Xt Intrinsics.  Is this the same as
>Microsoft's PM for OS/2?  Is it the same in X and OS/2 both in terms of look 
>and feel to the user as well as in terms  of toolkit calls to the programmer?
>
Athena, DECW run on X windows. In fact, DECW will be a part of OSF and will
be distributed by them in June (last I heard).

As far as the look and feel? I think MOTIF is the winner from what I have seen
and used; next runner up is DECW which is a tremendous improvement over all
the other widget sets and it is commercially supported. I have used all of
these and as far as ease of use and functionality goes I would place DECW
at the top right now; if you are willing to wait a little MOTIF will offer
tremendous advantages as far as portability, look-and-feel and probably
functionality. At any rate, I think you should give DECW and MOTIF serious
consideration, Athena is pretty primitive compared to either.
>-- How hard is it to port between these?  And how hard would it be to port from
>Microsoft Windows?
>
>
>Thanks in advance,

As I said, I programmed using all three that I mentioned and they are pretty
different. My guess is that it will not be too easy to port from one to
the other.
>
>Andrew Lieberman
>Library Systems Office
>UC Berkeley

Reha Elci