Newsgroups: comp.windows.open-look
Distribution: world
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 92 10:18:16 EDT
From: fgreco@fis1026.shearson.com (Frank Greco)
Subject: Re: How do Motif and OpenLook compare?

> My dept. is in a position to purchase either Motif or OpenLook, and
> I was hoping I could get some opinions on which is superior, or

	Neither.  First, You cannot purchase Motif or OPEN LOOK; they
	are both specifications not software.  There are several toolkits
	that implement the Motif LnF (ie, OSF's, Solbourne's OI) and 
	there are several the implement the OPEN LOOK LnF (ie, XView, OLIT, 
	Solbourne's OI, TNT).
	
	It is a purely subjective decision.
	
	If you want the Xt-style of API and a MS Windows look (but
	definitely not the feel), you go with OSF's Motif toolkit.
	Note that there are some juicy bugs if you use OSF's 1.1
	toolkit, which you currently must use with OpenWindows;  you
	cannot use the newer OSF Motif toolkit without R5 (I'm told).
	And of course, OW 3.0 is not R5 compatible.

	If you want a more spartan (but more efficient imho) Lnf, you
	go with OPEN LOOK and choose the Xt-style (fugly imho) with
	OLIT, Sunview-style with XView (very, very easy to program, but
	a bit inflexible and hard to extend) or truly object-oriented
	elegant and suicidal with TNT/NeWS.

	You can look at abstract toolkits like OI, Moolit, Aspect and
	XVT which either give you the runtime (or dynamic-link time)
	choice of GUI (OI, Moolit), or a higher level toolkit "on-top"
	of Motif/Olit/MS-Windows (XVT, Aspect).

> alerting me to any problems which could influence the decision. I
> was also hoping to find out what kind of overhead is involved in
> adding these on top of X-Windows. I am kind of assuming that graphic
> applications will take more CPU cycles running either of these as
> opposed to using twm with the Athena Widget set, but I'd like to

	You can make the Athena widgets run just as slow with the 3-D
	extension posted recently...

	It depends where the X client resides.  I was happy 2 years ago
	with a 3/60 basically as an X terminal with *all* my jobs remote; but
	that meant I needed more RAM/disk (swap) on my
	"CPU-server/X-Window-Client Server" (hope you get what I mean
	there).  Of course this is not a true distributed environment,
	so keep that in mind.  I'm much happier with a SS2 with 64 MB
	and a 400 MB drive in a truly distributed and network-efficient
	environment.

	Graphic applications will take a toll on the network (if images
	are being passed back and forth); that's X for you.  I'd also
	suggest looking into a workstation that has graphics
	acceleration.  Also take a look at Sun's new graphics extension
	to OpenWindows; you'll get substantial performance increases if
	you use it (it's a layer below Xlib if I'm not mistaken... I
	wish I could remember the product name though).

	One thing though, OpenWindows is slower, but more functional
	than MIT's vanilla X *given the same RAM*.  Subsequently OW
	requires more RAM to run efficiently; the more the better.

> know if the overhead for either is significant, or if one is
> superior to the other. It's also important to know if one is clearly
> easier to write applications in, although we will almost certainly
> obtain a GUI builder for which ever one we decide on. If you think

	From my experience, despite its blemishes, XView is by far and
	away the easiest API for application programmers (ie,
	Non-XWindow experts) with Devguide 3.0 the low-cost winner in
	the builder area.  Caveat: Devguide (actually a postprocessor
	called golit) still doesn't produce decent OLIT code.  Other
	builders have flash and sexier features; but Devguide 3.0
	(note: *not* 1.1) gets the job done quite nicely.  But it still
	cannot handle fonts (and in some places, color) well at all.

> from these questions that I'm a neophyte to X-windows and either of
> these products, you are correct. The only real GUI application I
> have written was in SunView, and had no widgets/gadgets whatever,
> but did use menus and tracked the mouse. The applications that
> we will use will not need to be really GUI intensive (for now), but
> the easier it can be made the better.

	If you're familiar with SunView, you'll definitely like XView.


	Frank G.

	Caveat1: Party line from Sun is that customers use OLIT though.
	You'll have to ask them why yourself.

	Caveat2: We get to revisit all our GUI choices when SunSoft's
	DOE hits the ground running.
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