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- #
- # WINTERP Copyright 1989, 1990, 1991 Hewlett-Packard Company (by Niels Mayer).
- # XLISP version 2.1, Copyright (c) 1989, by David Betz.
- #
- # Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software and its
- # documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that
- # the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that
- # copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting
- # documentation, and that the name of Hewlett-Packard, David Betz and
- # Niels Mayer not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution
- # of the software without specific, written prior permission. Hewlett-Packard,
- # David Betz and Niels Mayer makes no representations about the suitability of
- # this software and documentation for any purpose. It is provided "as is"
- # without express or implied warranty.
- #
-
- WINTERP: An object-oriented rapid prototyping, development and delivery
- environment for building user-customizable applications with the OSF/Motif
- UI Toolkit.
-
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- WINTERP is a Widget INTERPreter, an application development environment
- enabling rapid prototyping of graphical user-interfaces (GUI) through the
- interactive programmatic manipulation of user interface objects and their
- attached actions. The interpreter, based on David Betz's XLISP, provides an
- interface to the X11 toolkit Intrinsics (Xtk), the OSF/Motif widget set,
- primitives for collecting data from UN*X processes, and facilities for
- interacting with other UN*X processes. WINTERP thus supports rapid
- prototyping of GUI-based applications by allowing the user to interactively
- change both the UI appearance and application functionality. These features
- make WINTERP a good tool for learning and experimenting with the
- capabilities of the OSF/Motif UI toolkit, allowing UI designers to more
- easily play "what if" games with different interface styles.
-
- WINTERP is also an excellent platform for delivering extensible or
- customizable applications. By embedding a small, efficient language
- interpreter with UI primitives within the delivered application, users and
- system integrators can tailor the static and dynamic layout of the UI,
- UI-to-application dialogue, and application functionality. WINTERP's use of
- a real programming language for customization allows WINTERP-based
- applications to be much more flexible than applications using customization
- schemes provided by the X resource database or OSF/Motif's UIL (user
- interface language).
-
- An environment similar to WINTERP's already exists in the Gnu-Emacs text
- editor -- WINTERP was strongly influenced by Gnu-Emacs' successful design.
- In Gnu-Emacs, a mini-Lisp interpreter is used to extend the editor to
- provide text-browser style interfaces to a number of UN*X applications
- (e.g. e-mail user agents, directory browsers, debuggers, etc). Whereas
- Emacs-Lisp enables the creation of new applications by tying together
- C-implemented primitives operating on text-buffer UI objects, WINTERP-Lisp
- ties together operations on graphical UI objects implemented by the Motif
- widgets. Both achieve a high degree of customizability that is common for
- systems implemented in Lisp, while still attaining the speed of execution
- and (relatively) small size associated with C-implemented applications.
-
- Other features:
- * WINTERP is free software -- available via anonymous ftp from
- export.lcs.mit.edu.
- * Portable -- runs without porting on many Unix systems.
- * Interface to gnuemacs' lisp-mode allows code to be developed
- and tested without leaving the editor;
- * Built-in RPC mechanism for inter-application communications;
- * XLISP provides a simple Smalltalk-like object system.
- * OSF/Motif widgets are real XLISP objects -- widgets can be
- specialized via subclassing, methods added or altered, etc.
- * Automatic storage management of Motif/Xt/X data.
- * Contains facilities for "direct manipulation" of UI components;
-
-