TeleUSE

Yet few organizations are really obtaining these benefits. They're finding that object-oriented development is often less straightforward than they thought, and that it can require just as much time and effort as more traditional methods. Most tools claiming to support the process tend merely to offer nods in its direction, providing "cut and paste" interface builders or generating C++ code at the back end.

Today's engineers need a comprehensive, full-featured solution that supports an object-oriented approach throughout the entire life cycle of GUI application development-from concept, through design and development, to the generation of code that truly mirrors an application's object-oriented design.

That solution is TeleUSE. Thomson Software Products' latest release of the renowned TeleUSE User Interface Management System (UIMS) provides all the tools developers need to interactively design and build fully object-oriented, Motif-based GUIs in C or C++, supporting Motif 1.2 and X11R5. You can use TeleUSE to generate C code, UIL, or C++ classes that map directly to your designs.

TeleUSE Highlights:

• User Interface Templates with Multilevel Encapsulation for flexibility and simplicity in reusing objects in other areas

• Rules-Based, Event-Driven Callback Script Modules drastically reduce the amount of time and work required to write callback code in reusable modules

• "X Windows Smart" Debugging for rapid and efficient debugging of callback code

• C++ Class Generation lets you work smarter by providing full access to GUI components (such as reuse, subclasses, instantiation, etc.)

• Generation of Reusable Software Components means that you can get your job done faster by selecting from a library of GUI object s

• Advanced Application Building automates the build process and allows for customization and third-party tools integration

• World-Class Open Systems Support from Thomson Software Products for ease and flexibility in creating portable and distributed applications

TeleUSE Features

User Interface Templates with Multilevel Encapsulation

TeleUSE's Visual Interactive Presentation (VIP) tool allows you to easily design object-oriented widget templates-screen elements, screens, or groups of screens that can be reused within or across applications. A developer needing a control panel, for example, can simply use an existing control panel template, and this new object will inherit the widgets, resource values, and methods defined in the template. Templates can be viewed and edited either through the VIP tool or within the outline-oriented tree editor, which displays a template's components as nodes in a tree hierarchy.

Not only does the system support true inheritance across all instances of a template, but with TeleUSE, a template's designer can use the object-oriented mechanism of encapsulation, or data hiding, to selectively control which information in a template will be revealed to its users. Users can access and change particular template parameters, add certain nodes to a template, or directly edit selected nodes-all without seeing any information that is not absolutely necessary to the operation at hand.

The benefits? Encapsulation gives the designer flexibility in providing for a template's reuse. It shields users from complex or irrelevant information, so they can quickly use even large templates in different application contexts. And features that are integral to the original template design are protected-and maintained through all instances of the template-to enforce changing corporate standards.

Rules-Based, Event-Driven Callback Scripts

One of the most powerful features of TeleUSE is its Dialog Manager, which lets you specify, manage, and control the dynamic, or dialog, code that connects the GUI to the application code. You do so not through painstaking hard-coding of callbacks and events-although this option is available should you so choose-but rather by writing simple, object-oriented callback scripts that define the rules to be used when given events occur. The scripts are high-level abstractions of the X and Motif library routines. Ordinarily written from scratch, these scriptsfully insulate you from the nuances and complexities of the underlying window system. They let you accomplish all the callbacks and event handling your application needs in a fraction of the time, and with a fraction of the instructions, required by direct low level coding. You can master the scripts' use and syntax in less than three days of training-and they're not just easy to write, but easy to read as well. At any time during development or maintenance, you can locate needed changes in moments and make those changes with a few keystrokes. In generating C or C++ code from your dialog files, TeleUSE handles memory management automatically. And the files are broken into object-oriented dialog modules that can be instantiated, like UI templates, as classes-which means that they can be created, augmented, and modified on the fly, during runtime.

"X Windows Smart" Debugging

TeleUSE's graphical, interactive Dialog Debugger traces callback code as it is associated with X events, offering a significant advantage over general-purpose C and C++ debuggers. And you can run the Dialog Debugger in concert with popular third-party tools, such as those from CenterLine Software, to debug dialog and application code simultaneously.

C++ Class Generation

TeleUSE generates true C++ classes that are directly mapped to your design, and these classes then create and manage Motif user interface elements. With this capability, TeleUSE's VIP tool becomes a visual C++ class designer, from which you can specify callbacks as member functions. You are, in effect, defining C++ objects that tightly integrate the presentation (data) and dialog (behavior) components of your application. The results? First, you can instantiate and change widget templates dynamically, at runtime, just as easily as during a VIP session. And second, because TeleUSE implements the key components of an application and its interface as C++ classes-using Motif widgets as primitives-you enjoy true tool support for the optimal C++/Motif programming techniques defined by Doug Young in his highly-regarded book Object-Oriented Programming With C++ and OSF/Motif.* Your applications and their components are extremely easy to reuse, and the effort required for product maintenance is reduced dramatically.

Automatic Generation of Reusable Software Components

The User Interface (UI) Builder of TeleUSE can build not only fully executable applications but reusable software components-that package visible portions of an interface with their associated dynamic behavior. You can quickly create a repository of these components and use them repeatedly as fully operational building blocks for larger applications. The result? Engineers in your organization need no longer spend time "reinventing the wheel." Shared reusable components make it easy to establish core technologies, then use them to produce any number of different products. And the benefits accrue over time. With each new development effort, new components are added to the repository, which only expands the ability to share work among projects-and to further reduce development cycles.

Advanced Application Building

The UI Builder offers a wide range of hooks into third-party tools and configuration management systems, along with over 100 file switches for customizing the automated build process. You can, for example, run dialog scripts in interpreted mode, for rapid prototyping, testing, and changing the interface during runtime. And again, the UI Builder can build not only fully executable applications but cohesive, shared software components that can be reused across development projects.

World-Class Open Systems Support from Thomson Software Products

As one of the industry's leading supporters of open systems computing, and active member of the Open Software Foundation (OSF), Thomson Software Products offers a full range of products that help you create and deliver portable, distributed software systems that are rapidly becoming today's client/server computing standard. And our products offer a wide array of features and mechanisms that enable you to use them in concert with other leading development tools. With TeleUSE, for example, you can very easily add custom or third-party widgets to your TeleUSE widget palette, for immense flexibility in designing your GUIs.

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