Why Are Modern X11 Tookits Not Written For Xt? 10
Vinodh D Rajan asks: "Being fed up with the disparate look and feel among the Linux toolkits and incompatibilities between them, I recently started studying the user interfaces available under Linux, something I called The Unified Linux Desktop. For this I started studying how GTK+, QT, FLTK, GNUstep, Motif, Xaw, etc all work. The more I studied them, the more I wondered as to why modern tookits are not written against the Xt standard, since it is the one that has been standardized. Since Motif has been so successful, why not spend effort trying to improve it and provide a common framework for component development, instead writing incompatible toolkits?"
"I am sure that any inadequacies in Xt can be improved. Projects like neXtaw dramatically improves Xaw look and feel. Why not just develop the standards instead of developing newer stuff that is incompatible with standards. Besides the way GTK+'s object system works, seems almost similar to Xt's object system. Apart from cross platform development concerns, what made GTK+ developers write their own subsystem instead of using Xt."
Re:Documentation (Score:2)
Just to play devil's advocate for a second:
At least Xt *has* man pages. Sure, there's plenty of HTML documentation for gtk+, but when you're in the middle of a coding session and you can't remember the arguments to a function, suspending and reading the man page is a lot less hassle than firing up a web browser and navigating to the right page. Qt used to have the same problem, but I believe there are now man pages for Qt classes and member functions.The main problem with Xt, though, is not the documentation. It's the fact that it's not sufficiently abstracted. You can't sit down and write a standalone Xt app that does anything meaningful. You need to know raw Xlib as well in order to do the things that Xt can't. When you add Motif into the equation, things get even worse. You need to know all three. Looking at the X books on my shelf, that's several thousand pages of documentation that you need to know about before you can write anything useful. Both gtk+ and qt let you write an application without having to know about the underlying Xlib layer. If you've ever had to do any Motif or Xt programming, you'd know just how big a benefit that is. I'm just glad I don't have to do it any more...
X11 is the root cause (Score:1)
I've been programming for lots of years now. I've done Amiga programming. I've done Windows programming. I've done Mac programming. I've done Unix/Linux console programming. I've even done CFX-9850G programming (it's a seriously overpowered Casio calculator).
However, nothing prepared me for what to expect when I delved into X-Windows programming. It was absolutely disgusting. Before I go any further, let me make a few points:
* Yes, I understand most of it
* Yes, I understand it was designed with a clear separation between display and application (server/client).
* Yes, I use 8-space tabs.
The executive summary: X11 is bloated like a goldfish after eating a crocodile.
I admire the extreme flexibility of X. I admire the degree of control of X. But I absolutely detest the extreme fatuousness (kids, use a dictionary, or ask your parents!) of the whole protocol.
This may, at first, seem off-topic. However, you should stop and think for a moment. Is everybody barking up the wrong tree? Am I a console-using lunatic? Is it important for a monarch to know the land speed of an African swallow?
David.
Re:X11 is the root cause (Score:1)
Documentation (Score:1)
Another reason may be the structure of the API itself. It's rather complex. Not much is "default" until you choose otherwise, as in Gtk+. Instead you have to make all the decisions about the properties of a window before it can be displayed. Again, a showstopper for quick hacks.
Portability (Score:1)
Good riddance to Xt. (Score:1)
There are several reasons why toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt aren't based directly on Xt.
The only possible reason to use Motif/Xt is to deal with legacy applications.
Re:X11 is the root cause (Score:1)
Motif is simply unapproachable for the beginner (Score:3)
I am a 'child of the internet' when it comes to programming - i.e everything i know about computers and programming i either learnt from the net, or from books I bought because i wanted to expand the knowldege i gained from the net.
If i had gone to university, maybe i would have been exposed to Motif, but since its a Windows world out there for most of the youth today, theyre going to look for something more immediately similar to the Win32 API.
When i look around the net for information, there just isn't anything obviously useful for Motif - You can get so much more done, so much faster, if you use the amazing open-source technologies like GTK+, GNOME, Qt, SDL etc.
Since Motif has been opened, we might see more, but from my point of view, Motif is a dead horse (an ugly dead horse at that), which i simply see no need to bother with. If you have a huge, existing application that uses Motif, then you probably want to persist with it, but if youre starting fresh, why would you use Motif?
The question really should be 'What does OpenMotif bring to the table for the open source developer compared to the existing standards like GTK+ and Qt?'
motif (Score:1)
Of course, this is just a guess, and if anyone can correct me, please go ahead.
-mdek.net [mdek.net]
Re:Documentation (Score:1)
Motif on the other hand is a real pain in the ass. I took one look at Motif on an SGI and decided to download and install GTK. It was really ugly. The only thing I know about Xt is that those two letter pop up a lot with Motif.