From: dwight@geohub.gcn.uoknor.edu (Dwight D. Moore)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x.motif
Subject: Re: Opinion of O'Reilly Guides to the X Window System
Date: 9 Oct 92 15:26:49 GMT
Article-I.D.: constell.1992Oct9.152649.1989
Reply-To: dwight@geohub.gcn.uoknor.edu
Organization: Geosciences Computing Network, Univ. of Oklahoma
Originator: news@kittyhawk.ecn.uoknor.edu

In article <1992Oct7.172357.13780@PA.dec.com>, klee@wsl.dec.com (Ken Lee) writes:

|>1.  subclassing.  Whether you politically support or oppose subclassing
|>Motif widgets, alot of users need to do it and are doing it.  The
|>O'Reilly Xt and Motif books provide little useful information on this
|>subject.  In contrast, the combination of the Asente/Swick book and the
|>Berlage book provide enough info for most users to do useful work.
|>
Here, here, I agree. I find the O'Reilly books very useful as a reference,
but there needs to be more detail  for creating user-defined widgets
and subclassing. As someone has said, now that I know more on the
subject, more detail at the beggining would have been useful.
This is a hint to ORA for the next edition.

|>2.  UIL.  UIL is a standard part of Motif.  A complete tutorial on
|>Motif should cover it.  Other Motif tutorials, such as Berlage's book,
|>cover it.  Users can decide whether or not to use it.  I don't think
|>it's right for books calling themselves "the definitive guides" to
|>arbitrarily ignore standard functionality.
|>
I agree, like it or not, it should be covered in the ORA manual. That
is a good technical writer skill, and appropriate.

UIL is very useful for rapid prototyping, quick interface changes, and keeping
the application code smaller (source not executables). It would be
a better tool if OSF would include an interface builder tool(s) for using
UIL.  I use DEC's VUIT to generate the UIL and move it to the U*X box
upon which we are developing the code, and this workds great.
Learning another "language" is overhead that most don't look 
forward to doing. Wcl is an alternative...does it run on VMS?...I have
to make portable code, and ensuring that Wcl is on each machine is
a developer's nightmare.  Usually, if a machine has Motif, the UIL
tools are there usually. I don't want to port Wcl to each target platform.

I don't have experience with Wcl, does it allow a description to be used as
a template to create multiple copies, similar to UIL?

|>3.  Complex technical subjects.  In general, I've found the O'Reilly
|>books to be lacking (compared to the competition) when it comes to
|>discussing complex problems commonly found during industrial
|>development.  For example, the Asente/Swick book is infinitely more
|>useful than the O'Reilly books on the X Toolkit.  Perhaps the
|>Asente/Swick book is extraordinary, but I think it is the resposibility
|>of a useful bibliography to point this out.
|>
I don't have this book, and I missed the bibliograph. Ken, could you mail me
a copy?

|>-- 
|>Ken Lee
|>DEC Western Software Laboratory, Palo Alto, Calif.
|>Internet: klee@wsl.dec.com
|>uucp: uunet!decwrl!klee
|>

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Dwight D. Moore
Geosciences Computing Network
University of Oklahoma

dwight@geohub.gcn.uoknor.edu (129.15.40.10)
These opinions do not necessarily represent the opinions of OU or the GCN.
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Newsgroups: comp.windows.x.motif