WINTERP 2.0
The OSF/Motif WIDGET INTERPreter
by Niels Mayer
An interactive object-oriented user interface language for rapid
prototyping, development and delivery of extensible applications with Motif
GUIs and Xtango graphics/animation.
WINTERP News:
Niels Mayer recently released WINTERP 2.0 on the X Consortium's
X11r6 "contrib" distribution. WINTERP is a rapid prototyping
environment for creating and delivering GUI-based applications. It fills
the same niche as TCL/TK, and Python, while employing more proven (and
stable) underlying technologies. WINTERP uses a small, fast,
object-oriented mini-Lisp interpreter based on XLISP-PLUS (David
Betz, Tom Almy, Luke Tierney, et al), and has an object oriented
interface to the OSF/Motif widget class hierarchy, and a
combination of high-level object and functional interfaces to the Xtoolkit,
Xlib, and underlying Unix system libraries. This environment significantly
simplifies the construction of GUI-based applications, and makes these
applications easier to modify and extend throughout the software
life-cycle. It allows for the development of extensible applications in a
safe execution environment -- errors in a new module won't destroy the
whole system.
In addition to application develompent, WINTERP's features make it a good
tool for learning about and experimenting with the capabilities of the
OSF/Motif UI toolkit. Its rapid prototyping features allow UI and
application designers to more easily play "what if" games with different
interface styles.
WINTERP 2.0 new features:
- An improved Object Oriented Lisp (based on XLISP-PLUS by David
Betz and Tom Almy);
- A high-level animation/graphics widget-class (based on Xtango by
John Stasko) which lets you do the kinds of graphics that Motif ignores,
without the tedium of Xlib-level programming;
- The ability to easily create new widget classes employing arbitrary
graphical behavior without the tedium of programming in the Xt intrinsics
and Xlib;
- Enable WINTERP-GUIs to communicate with multiple asynchronous,
interactive unix subprocesses, facilitating the construction of GUI interfaces
to existing line/terminal based programs. (This facility based on Don Libes'
expect library);
- Table and XmGraph widgets;
- Lots of bugfixes, improvements, new examples, etc.
For more information...
Click here
to see a brief blurb describing WINTERP.
Click here
to read the WINTERP 2.0 README file.
WINTERP 2.0 Availability:
WINTERP 2.0 is available for free via anonymous ftp from the X
Consortium (ftp.x.org:/contrib/devel_tools), and is also available on the
X11r6 "contrib/Motif" distribution and on Prime Time Freeware for Unix
CD-ROM (contact Rich Morin rdm@cfcl.com). The environment is complete and
should compile "right out of the box" without porting on most Unix systems
(Unix domain sockets and bsd networking preferred but not required, Motif
1.1 or 1.2 and X11r5 or X11r6 X libraries are required). WINTERP
2.0, within two weeks of it's release, has been reported to work on SGI
Irix 5.2, HP HPUX 8.0 and 9.0 (s300,s400,s700,s800), SunOS 4.1.3 (using
'gcc', or using Sun's product 'cc' compiler), Sun Solaris 2.3 (with Sun's
2.3 SDK supplied Motif and compiler), DEC Ultrix 4.3, DEC OSF1 V2.0,
NeXTStep 3.0 (with CoXist X/Motif), Linux (using 'gcc'), and AIX 3.2.5 on
IBM RS6000 (using IBM's product 'cc').
Obtaining the WINTERP software distribution:
WINTERP documentation:
WINTERP examples:
Some old papers/publications describing WINTERP version 1.X:
For discussions on WINTERP, and to get details of upcoming releases, please
join the WINTERP mailing list, by sending mail to
winterp-request@netcom.com.
mayer@eit.com