Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 17:27:53 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Cc: alk@Think.COM (Tony Kimball), hackers@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: Lesstif (motif compatible) package. Message-ID: <8945.829268873@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 11 Apr 1996 12:22:23 PDT." <199604111922.MAA04557@phaeton.artisoft.com>
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> > I disagree profoundly. Tk is the closest thing to a standard. > > Moreover, Tk is portable to the major non-unix platforms, > > while Motif is not. > > Tk is interpreted. This is a *HUGE* drawback if what you are > selling is a commercial product. That's not actually a drawback if you're just trying to use it as a Motif replacement. Look at the TCL/Tk book, Terry, and you'll see that there's a C API for all the Tk functions as well. I can construct user interfaces with Tk without writing a single line of TCL code. Naturally, I'll totally throw away my rapid prototyping abilities as a result, but if this were really important for some reason then that'd be an option. There are also Tcl/Tk compilers on this horizon that promise to give one the best of both worlds and, finally, if commercial protection is all you want then you can also compile the Tcl or Tk code into your final production binary as an encrypted string and have a little bootstrap decrypt it before passing it to Tcl_Eval(). > Tk has Motif drag-and-drop interoperability? This I have got to see... I think you may be misinterpreting him. Tk has a powerful D&D mechanism, yes, though I doubt that it's Motif compatible. This is probably a feature. :-) One thing people also frequently neglect is that Tk is a *much nicer* environment than Motif! I can't count the number of times that I've had my interface 98% complete and then run smack into the boundry cases where I've got something I want to represent graphically but none of the available objects are going to do it for me. I either end up writing my own Motif widget, which is a real pain in the butt and can easily take twice the time it takes me to write the code that USES the damn thing, or I construct an inferior interface that makes a best effort attempt with the existing stuff. Tk gives me a very nice "canvas" widget which allows me to create very arbitrarily rendered interface objects and bind actions to them just like the higher level objects. Don't knock this one until you've tried it, seriously! I know, you're now going to come back with the argument that one can trivially write a blah blah blah widget in Motif (probably using the word "virtualize" at least once :-) but that's not the point - I don't WANT to have to write custom frobs for Motif each time I want to display a triangular button or a flipping-page widget or whatever, nor do I want to have to reinvent the generalized canvas widget there. I also know about the "gadget" mechanism in Xt, but that presents a much much lower level interface than Tk's canvas gives me. I know that I could also encapsulate the Tk canvas object into a Motif application fairly easily, but if I'm going to drag libTk into my application as it is then I might as well just throw out Motif and use Tk for everything - such a huge application just to get the dubious benefits of Motif I don't want or need. Jordan P.S. And yes, I *have* used Motif in commercial software. I know very well what it can and cannot do.
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