Subject: Programmer toolkits for NeWS

From: Matt Landau <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 86 22:36:39 EST

It's probably much too early to start talking about this, but we need
something to discuss other than the rash of "please add me" messages :-)

For a long time, one of the serious deficiencies of X has been the lack of
decent, standard programmer's toolkits for building interfaces more
complicated than the simple X library calls - a real necessity if X code is
to be truly portable at the same time as doing anything useful.  Supposedly,
the X v10r4 tape due out this week will help solve this problem by including
toolkits from DEC and HP.

Has Sun or anyone else begun work on a toolkit for NeWS that they're
planning on sharing with the world?  It seems to me this will be a critical
acceptance issue with NeWS vs. X -- if you can't take some steps to hide the
PostScript interface from programmers who don't really need to muck around
at that level, you're going to have a problem getting people to program for
NeWS.  If are/know of someone working on a solution to this problem, why not
let us know?  Some input from the general NeWS-using (or potential
NeWS-using) community would probably go a long way toward getting this right
the first time.
--
 Matt Landau      	 		BBN Laboratories, Inc.
    [email-masked]		10 Moulton Street, Cambridge MA 02238
 ...seismo!diamond.bbn.com!mlandau      (617) 497-2429

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From: "Roger Hayes" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 86 21:54:05 MST

I gather that Sun will release a SunView emulator with NeWS;
I have no idea how many of my old programs will run how fast.

I concur that a proper toolkit is needed; SunView is fairly awkward to
use.  I would prefer something like Rob Pike's Blit library, or
MacApp.  (I realize that these are on opposite ends of the spectrum in
some respects.  They both satisfy "make the simple things simple, and
the hard things possible".)

And wouldn't a C++ library be nice?

		Roger Hayes
		CS Dept, U of Arizona
		[email-masked]