Platform Independent FAQ Part Two

C/C++ from A to N

Allegris Workshop (formerly C++/Views)

Amulet

Don's Class Application (DCLAP) library

Galaxy

GraphApp

ILOG Views

JAM

libWxm

MAINWin/XDE

Menuet/CPP

MetaCard

MEWEL User Interface Library

Microsoft Foundation Classes

NuTCRACKER X/SDK

Allegris Workshop (formerly C++/Views)

VENDOR:

INTERSOLV

9420 Key West Avenue

Rockville, MD 20850

1-800-547-4000 or 301-838-5000

email

info@intersolv.com

www

http://www.intersolv.com/

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

Allegris Workshop includes two components, the Allegris Foundation class library and the Portable Resource Workshop (replaces the C++/Views Constructor).

Additional features include printer, graphics, event, string, and various container classes as well as some higher-level classes e.g., VTableView and VToolBar, dockable toolbars, virtual listbox, and some other Windows 95 controls. Allegris Workshop also has geometry management so you can place objects based on relative coordinates, and persistent object storage.

The Portable Resource Workshop is the focal point of the development process. One uses the browser to navigate through one's application to, among other things, find appropriate GUI base classes. From there, one can derive new class descriptions which the browser uses to generate the necessary C++ source code. The user doesn't see individual events; they are handled by virtual callback functions in the base classes.

COMMENTS:

This product was C++/Views by Liant, recently been taken up by Intersolv to become Allegris Workshop. Intersolv have dropped the Macintosh and SGI Irix versions.

There is an additional product, Allegris Constructor, which sounds kinda VB for cross-platform... any info would be greatly appreciated.

WHAT THE USERS SAY:

(about C++/Views) They use a smalltalk model -- if you like smalltalk, great; if not, you may have some trouble. On the other hand, they also the Model/ View/ Controller architecture (that's a good thing).

They have a browser/editor -- it's simple to add a new message but it's reportedly kind-of clumsy to use. You may want to use a different environment like Borland's IDE under Microsoft Windows.

Amulet, V2.0

VENDOR:

Carnegie Mellon University

email

amulet@cs.cmu.edu

www

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~amulet/amulet-home.html

ftp

ftp.cs.cmu.edu/usr0/anon/project/amulet/

DESCRIPTION:

AMULET is an entirely free, public domain user interface development environment in C++ for Windows NT or Windows 95, Macintosh, and Unix/X11 (since the source is distributed, it will work on any Unix platform).

More than just another free "virtual toolkit", Amulet includes many features specifically designed to make the creation of highly- interactive, graphical, direct manipulation user interfaces significantly easier.

Based on a proven earlier system, called Garnet, that was in wide use in the Lisp community, Amulet adds a number of important innovations and refinements. Important features of Amulet, v2.0 include: a dynamic, prototype-instance object system that makes prototyping easier; automatic constraint solving integrated with the object system; a `structured-graphics' model (also called a `display list') that handles automatic refresh of objects when the change; a high-level input model that makes it easy to add behaviors to objects and also supports undo and help for operations; and a full set of flexible widgets implemented using the Amulet intrinsics, so you can easily experiment with your own widgets. The current supplied widgets include: buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, menus, menu bars (pull-down menus), scroll bars, scrolling windows, and text input fields.

New to 2.0 are `gesture recognition', undo/redo, command-driven cut/copy/paste, assorted new widgets including standard error dialogs, GIF support, geometry management, and much improved debugging facilities.

Amulet comes with complete documentation including a tutorial.

Don's Class Application (DCLAP) library.

VENDOR:

Don Gilbert,

Indiana University at Bloomington, Biocomputing Dept.

email

dclap@bio.indiana.edu

ftp

ftp://ftp.bio.indiana.edu/util/dclap

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

This is a (free-of-charge) barebones C++ application framework with no detailed documentation.

Primary classes include

• Application methods including event tracking, task management, command do/undo, preferences, child application management
• Window, dialog, menu and file management
• TCP/IP networking, smtp, gopher and basic http
• Rich Text reading/display classes for Text, RTF, HTML, and graphics formats of PICT and GIF.
• Biosequence analysis methods

Its main current use is to build a biosequence editor and analysis application.

COMMENTS:

You can get it via anonymous ftp from ftp.bio.indiana.edu. It's in the /util/dclap directory.

It has been used on Mactintosh (68K, PowerMac; Systems 6 & 7), MSWindows (Win3, Win95, WinNT), XWindows/Unix (Solaris 2, Sunos 4, SGI Irix 5, DEC Unix, Linux). Motif libraries are required for the XWindow version.

According to the author, it "has several important flaws". But, on the other hand, it's free for non-commercial uses. It is built on the cross-platform toolkit from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) available for anonymous ftp from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov as /toolbox/ncbi_tools/ncbi.tar.Z.

Galaxy, V2.5

VENDOR:

Visix

11440 Commerce Park Drive

Reston, Virginia 22091

(800) 832-8668 (inquiries)

(703) 758-2711 (voice)

email

galaxy@visix.com

www

http://www.visix.com/products/galaxy/

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

There are C++ and C versions of this library. The package includes a WYSIWYG GUI builder. They ship the tools with static and dynamically loaded libraries, and debugging libraries. Each version provides multi-platform look-and-feel, allowing you to see what your program will look like on another platform.

The tools are, reportedly, pretty full-featured. User-interface items have extensive abstraction (for example, they have a confirmation-type dialog that resolves to a push-pin and `apply' button under OpenLook, but `ok', `apply', `cancel' buttons under motif). Also, errors are handled with an abstract exception handling framework. They support geometry management and internationalization of typefaces (at least Japanese), money, and data formatting. Finally, they have a portable help engine.

Some extra-cool features include memory leak detection and C-language objects for text (multi-styled, multi-font text with embedded graphics), list (spreadsheet-like for handling up to 2^31 x 2^31 cells with customizable displays), and graphics processing. They include lots of high-level objects for use by developers; these objects include a font chooser, an icon editor, a directory browser (for file selection), and a color chooser.

In addition to a GUI portability platform, Galaxy also includes inter-process communication (IPC), extensive filesystem, and sound support portability across platforms.

SUPPORT:

You get no support when you buy the product. If you buy the support, it includes product updates and phone access to their developers. According to one of Galaxy's developers "not buying support is really a false economy".

COMMENTS:

These guys have implemented a full superset approach to their API. Often, their objects are more capable than the native-mode object would if you had not used their code. Galaxy is an emulated API (they don't layer on-top of other tools); they compile, for example, down to Xlib under Motif or OpenLook.

This software won Unix Review's Outstanding Product Award (1993) for Software Development Front-Ends.

They claim support for MS-Windows v3.1, but support is only for Win32s and not Win16. They no longer support the Watcom 32-bit Windows 3.1 format.

Visix have finally relented, and stopped insisting that evaluators must first attend a one-week course on the product... now you can convice your manager that it's worth evaluating!

Visix was founded in 1989 and is privately held. Galaxy has been in development since 1986 and has been on-the-market since 1992. Over 2,000 copies of Galaxy has been licensed to more than 250 companies.

Visix used to sell single look-and-feel packages (e.g. you get just the MS-Windows LAF) but stopped as "less than 10%" savings in size.

Visix say that their three 'critical design goals' are cross-platform, speed, and full-featured. I think that this product is a good example of `you get what you pay for' or `fast, cheap, good - choose two'.

WHAT THE USERS SAY:

One user says, "If you are looking at cross-platform development environments, you absolutely MUST take a look at Galaxy, from Visix Software. Very good interface builder, covers ALL layers of the API, from GUI to networking, very well designed API, C++ version, etc. [...] We have had good results with it so far." Another user agrees, "I've been using their software for almost 2 years now and I love it", adding, "I lead a project that had > 80K lines of C / C++ that had less than 100 lines [different] between the SunOS and MS-Windows versions."

REVIEWER'S IMPRESSIONS:

These guys have been extremely helpful getting their portion of this FAQ going. I think that this could be indicative of seriously superlative support (that's an awful lot of alliteration).

Using their C product produces extremely verbose code; it seems to me that they should hide more of the detail from the programmer.

Most of the extraneous code can be cut from their examples and pasted into your application, but good luck figuring out what that code does. On the other hand, once the cut-and-paste tango is accomplished, one can achieve quite good results. As with many other PIGUIs I've seen, the learning curve is nearly vertical (and the documentation doesn't help much) but once you've gotten used to the API, you can get some neat things done.

GraphApp

VENDOR:

Lachlan Patrick

Department of Computer Science

University of Sydney

NSW 2006

Australia

www

http://www.cs.su.oz.au/~loki/graphapp/

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

GraphApp is a fairly simple abstraction in C, of the common features of Microsoft Windows, Motif, and Athena widgets. (a Macintosh version is planned also). It seems to be targetted at students, however (or perhaps because of this) it is a very easy PIGUI toolkit to pick up and write GUI applications with.

Documentation in HTML format is available online, along with a short tutorial, also in HTML.

Currently available for Windows and UNIX, but a Macintosh port is nearing release.

ILOG Views

VENDOR:

ILOG Inc.

2105 Landings Drive

Mountain View, CA 94943

(415) 390-9000 (voice)

(415) 390-0946 (fax)

email

info@ilog.com

www

http://www.ilog.fr/

http://www.ilog.com/

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

ILOG Views is a portable C++ library for graphical applications, from the simple GUI forms to more sophisticated graphics.

It includes a WYSIWYG GUI editor, Studio, that manages projects and generates C++ classes. Studio offers numerous editing services with drag-and-drop mechanisms, geometry management and active variables for automatic updates. Developers can rapidly build GUI applications that meet their business needs with minimal raw C++ coding. Studio's framework includes a new command-based architecture and command panels that provide developers with hundreds of pre-defined application commands. Studio is fully customizable.

The ILOG Views' gadgets emulate Windows95, Windows3 and Motif look- and-feel on all platforms. They include note-books and spin-buttons among classical buttons, menus, sliders and textfields. Whatever is the development platform, the developer can test his/her interface with any look-and-feel, without porting or compiling.

A major differentiator from other PIGUI kits is the support for very high level graphing objects such as ready-to-use charts, Gantt charts, spreadsheets, hypertext, network graphers, maps and more. ILOG is also very strong on graphical representation, providing high-level classes to manage presentation of graphics objects by the thousands. It is possible to display the same objects in several windows simultaneously and to store them in layers that can be set visible/invisible for each window. ILOG Views provides editors with full source code to develop end-user specific editors for synopses, networks, and so on.

Other capabilities of ILOG Views include support for integration with databases, portable graphics, double buffering, persistent objects using ASCII files), IPC (sockets and RPC), OLE 2.0, and Internationalization through a message database mechanism and multi- byte strings. Studio is available with a Kanji and a Korean message database.

ActiveX components and plug-ins allow ILOG to be used to more simply create graphics-intensive Web applications.

OPTIONS:

ILOG DBLink (RDBMS connection library)

ILOG Server (Model-View-Controller for C++ objects)

ILOG Broker (Support distributed C++ objects transparently)

ILOG InForms provides datasources from Oracle, Informix, Sybase, Ingres and ODBC, for live manipulation during development of graphical-intensive applications. InForms generates much of the SQL code for the application, and allows point-and-click integration with graphical tables, controls or complex graphical objects. Flat files can also be accomodated.

ILOG Vision is a stand-alone product which provides a very high level interface to 3D graphics using OpenGL or Direct3D.

SUPPORT:

You get a 1-month support when you buy the product. Support includes product updates and hotline. Localized hotlines are available in most countries: USA, France, UK, Spain, Singapore, Australia (Headquaters and subsidiaries) and through distributors.

COMMENTS:

ILOG Views has received the following Awards:

• 1995, The X Journal' 1995 Editor's Choice.
• 1995, X Industry Achievment Award' Best Product of the Year
• 1996, Software Development Magazine Productivity in the Libraries and Components category.

ILOG is a 220-person ISV focused on C++ development tools. ILOG was created in 1987.

More than 600 sites worldwide are using ILOG Views to develop their graphical interfaces.

JAM 7 (JYACC Application Manager)

VENDOR:

JYACC, Inc.

116 John Street

New York, New York 10038

1-212-267-7722 (voice)

1-800-458-3313

www

http://www.prolifics.com/

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

This is a C-language library. The package includes a GUI builder.

JAM's Screen Editor boosts productivity with a fully graphical `drag and drop' application development environment. You can quickly build screens and other application objects using a superset of the controls supported in each GUI environment. JAM lets you edit multiple objects simultaneously and drag and drop objects between two or more open screens.

Other features include:

• Standard controls, e.g. text, list boxes, combo boxes, buttons etc
• Menu bars and icon bars
• Context sensitive help
• Grid controls, which present tabular data in a spreadsheet-like format
• Buisness graphics controls, which let you display 2-D and 3-D pie, bar, and line charts.
• Bitmap images in BMP,XPM,JPEG, and GIF formats.

JAM's Screen Wizard allows you to build fully functional screens and transactions that access a database. JAM's Transaction Manager simplifies the process of building high performance database applications by letting you invoke database operations - and apply transaction-specific control attributes - without coding. JAM automatically generates and executes the SQL statements needed to apply transactions.

OPTIONS:

JAM/ReportWriter 7 adds a report writing component to JAM. The new release provides sophisticated reporting capabilities to developers of JAM applications. The new Report Wizard lets you generate complex reports via point-and-click selection, with report formats of Column, Row, Cross-tab, and Address Labels.

JAM/WEB (Web Enterprise Builder) enables developers to build server- based database applications for the Web. Developers build virtual JAM/WEB `forms' and deploy them on a server system. JAM/WEB automatically converts the forms into dynamic HTML for display on a browser, and processes the submitted forms generating SQL to the back end database.

libWxm

VENDOR:

Visual Solutions

487 Groton Road

Westford, MA 01886

(508) 392-0100 (voice)

(508) 692-3102 (fax)

email

sales@vissol.com

www

http://www.vissim.com

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

libWxm emulates the MS Windows (win32/s) API. They support dialogs, resources, bitmaps, child windows and controls, custom controls, fonts, and GDI commands.

FUTURE PLANS:

MDI support, postscript printing, and DDE support.

MAINWin/XDE

VENDOR:

MAINSoft Corporation

1270 Oakmead parkway, suite 310

Sunnyvale, CA 94086

(800) MAIN-WIN (inquiries)

(415) 896-0708 (fax inquiries)

(408) 774-3400 (voice)

(408) 774-3404 (fax)

email

info@mainsoft.com

www

http://www.mainsoft.com/

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

MAINWin is a portable implementation (to any system offering POSIX compliance and Xlib) of the MS Windows API (including the Microsoft Foundation Classes 3.0 and 4.2) on Unix/X-Windows. They support OLE 2.0, DDEML, Win32 message format, and most of the Win32 APIs. The XDE includes printer support, a resource compiler, a help compiler (they have support for Winhelp using the windows .hlp files), a makefile generator plus some additional tools. Multi-threaded programming is now supported also.

The software's output runs directly on Xlib, and does not require Motif software. MAINWin allows the user to switch look-and-feel between MS-Windows and Motif from the system menu at run-time. In order to run a MAINWin application on a Unix workstation, users need a copy of the `MAINWin for Workstations' product for each machine on which the code runs.

MAINWin offers porting tools for MS Windows resources, the MS Windows hypertext help system (which uses the original rtf-format help files), shared libraries (DLLs), fonts, postscript printing, dynamic data exchange (DDE), and MS Windows Device Context APIs. Also included in this code is support for the Microsoft MFC 2.0 class library. Finally, MAINWin includes their DDR technology to provide PC-compatible file structures across all systems.

Documentation for with MAINWin includes the `MAINWin Cross-Development Guide', the `MAINWin API Function Call Status' document and the `MAINWin API Message and Control Status' document.

MAINWin's optional developer program includes a weekly status of issues reported to MAINSoft.

OPTIONS:

Visual Source Safe is available for UNIX. (Why you would want to use it, I don't know... CVS is free, and there are many better SCM products available on Unix)

COMMENTS:

MAINSoft has entered into a source code license agreement with Microsoft. This agreement allows MAINSoft to incorporate MS-Windows code and MFC into their product.

In addition, MAINWin includes something they call DOS Data Representation technology into their toolkit. This allows the user to use MS-DOS format files under the other platforms supported by their software.

MetaCard 2.1

VENDOR:

MetaCard Corporation

email

info@metacard.com

www

http://www.metacard.com/

ftp

ftp://ftp.metacard.com/MetaCard

news

comp.sys.mac.hypercard

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

MetaCard is a GUI development and multimedia authoring tool compatible with Apple Corporation's HyperCard. Anyone can use MetaCard to build GUI applications and hypermedia documents using a powerful, direct manipulation editor and an easy-to-learn scripting language.

MetaCard goes beyond HyperCard by including support for colour controls and images, tabbed-dialogs, vector graphics, multiple-font text fields and list boxes, combo-boxes, scrollbars and progress bars, and dialog boxes. MetaCard's scripting language has support for arrays, custom (user defined) object properties, and is based on high-perforance `virtual compiler' technology. Stacks developed with MetaCard are portable without recompiling among all supported platforms (14 for release 2.1) and can be distributed without licensing fees or royalties.

COMMENTS:

The high-level language approach supports much higher productivity than is possible with tools that rely on a third-generation language such as C/C++/Java. Similar in philosophy to Tcl/Tk, but much faster (around 8x for text-intensive operations, up to 30x for numeric-intensive operations), much easier to learn, native look and feel on all platforms, built-in GUI builder, built-in object persistence, and single-file distributions.

Menuet/CPP

VENDOR:

Autumn Hill Software, Inc.

1145 Ithaca Drive

Boulder, Co. 80303

(303) 494-8865 (voice)

(303) 494-7802 (fax)

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

Menuet/CPP is a C++ product (they also have a vanilla `C' product). They have a product called an Application Generator -- anyone know what this is?

MEWEL User Interface Library, Version 4.1

VENDOR:

Magma Systems

15 Bodwell Terrace

Millburn, NJ 07041

(201) 912-0192 (voice)

(201) 912-0103 (fax - orders only)

(201) 912-0668 (BBS, 9600-1200, N-8-1)

email

75300.2062@compuserve.com (Magma has a vendor support conference on CIS)

magma@bix.com (Magma has a vendor support conference on BIX)

www

http://www.uno.com/

ftp

ftp://ftp.uno.com/pub/uno/

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

MEWEL is a portable implementation of the MS Windows API; MEWEL/Motif is an implementation of the Windows API, MFC, and OWL for Motif. It is a C library, but is type-safe for C++. You can program your applications in C, or can use Microsoft's MFC, Borland's OWL, Liant's C++/Views, or wxWindows. MEWEL supports the usual stuff including icons, MDI, dialog boxes. MEWEL/Pro supports the 16 and 32-bit extenders that come with Borland PowerPack, Pharlap 286, Pharlap 386/TNT, Watcom/Rational DOS/4GW, and DJGPP's GO32. MEWEL is the only user interface library that can be implemented totally as a DOS DLL under Borland's PowerPack.

FUTURE PLANS:

"We are working on a version for MFC/NT [Microsoft Foundation Classes/Windows NT] using Pharlap TNT extender, but it's not ready yet." One nifty ramification of this is that one will be able to use MEWEL and the Pharlap DOS extender in order to port Windows NT applications to DOS.

COMMENTS:

You can download demos and info from ftp://ftp.uu.net/vendor/uno/

Microsoft Foundation Classes (Microsoft)

VENDOR:

Microsoft Corporation

One Microsoft Way

Redmond, Washington 98052-6399

(206) 882-8080 (voice)

(206) 93M-SFAX (fax)

www

http://www.microsoft.com/

news

comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.tools.mfc

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

Microsoft's Visual C++ is, of course, more than just a PIGUI; this suite of products includes both compilers and libraries for the various platforms they support. `Microsoft Visual C++' for the Intel and MIPS platforms targets MS-Windows-based operating systems and `Visual C++ Cross-Development Edition for Macintosh' (which I'll call VC++CDE:Mac, for short!) targets, well, the Macintosh System 7).

To produce Mac-targeted programs, you must develop your software on a Windows NT server and cross-compile to the Mac platform. VC++CDE:Mac includes a cross-compiler, libraries, and porting tools to build Mac-specific widgets and help flag various nonportable constructs.

Note: cross-development capability from Microsoft does not come string-free. Call Microsoft's fax back service at 206-635-2222 and select document No. 206 for a complete license agreement.

COMMENTS:

Microsoft was founded in 1975.

There are several 3rd-party tools that enable MFC programs to be ported to the most popular UNIX platforms.

WHAT THE USERS SAY:

Some users say that Mac programs developed with MFC don't look like Mac programs. This can be an issue, as Mac users can be very anti-Microsoft.

NuTCRACKER X/SDK 3.0

VENDOR:

DataFocus, Inc.

12450 Fair Lakes Circle, Suite 400

Fairfax, VA 22033

(703) 803-3343 (voice)

(703) 803-3344 (fax)

www

http://www.datafocus.com/

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

NuTCRACKER is a complete, integrated product family for developers who want to port their UNIX software -- either character-based or X/Motif -- to Windows NT or Windows 95. NuTCRACKER also provides the Wintif technology which lets Motif applications display with a Windows look-and-feel. Version 3.0 has been `enhanced' for Windows NT 4.0, and there is now an OpenGL option.

NuTCRACKER allows developers to recompile UNIX C, C++ source code and link it to NuTCRACKER DLLs, producing Win32 applications. NuTCRACKER supports Intel, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC.

They have a deployment seat or run-time distribution fees (called the Client Operating Environment, COE) with costs ranging from $98 to $239 or less, depending on volume and features needed (for example, whether an X/Server is included). Site licenses and buyouts are also available. Version 3.0 sees even more licensing options--- I will advise as soon as I hear.

Besides GUI portability, NuTCRACKER also supports Unix process control, Unix IPC mechanisms (i.e., shared memory, named pipes, BSD sockets, and semaphores) as well as some of Unix's security features. I'm told their demo consists of porting UNIX Mosaic to NT, where only 3 of 70,000 lines of code needed to be changed!

Version 5.2 of MKS toolkit is also included, to support calls to standard UNIX utilities that Microsoft don't supply.

SUPPORT:

Each purchase (or evaluation copy) of NuTCRACKER comes with 1 year's support bundled into the purchase price of the SDK. Support in year 2 and later is approximately $500-750. Support includes telephone, bug fixes and e-mail.

DataFocus offers a 5 day QuickStart on-site consultation for those customers that need extra help getting their port started.

FUTURE PLANS:

They have committed to supporting Windows 95, NT 4.0, BackOffice Logo and PowerPC.

COMMENTS:

Datafocus also sell a subset of this package, called NuTCRACKER SDK, for porting character-based (CUI) Unix programs to Windows NT/95; and the NuTCRACKER Operating Environment, runtime libraries to support API calls to UNIX APIs which allow the Unix application to make "Unix API calls to NT". It also supports X/Motif applications ported using NuTCRACKER X/SDK, and offers both a Motif and Windows look and feel. A low-cost Local X Server, which restricts connections to the local machine is also available.