The LessTif Homepage

The LessTif Homepage

LessTif is the Hungry Programmers' version of OSF/Motif®. It aims to be source compatible meaning that the same source code should compile with both and work exactly the same! LessTif is "free software": it is licensed under the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL). You might also want to check out The Open Source Web for a little more information about the Open Source philosophy in general.

The current version of LessTif is 0.95.0 as of June 10, 2006. The code is available for download in various packages.

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Inside LessTif By Harald Albrecht

Inside LessTif

By Harald Albrecht

Synthetic resources are a mechanism included in Motif that allows a developer to modify resource values as collected by or assigned to the Xt resource mechanism. That is, if a user should want to find the value of an Xt resource, but M*TIF would rather that the user not see the true value, the synthetic resource mechanism allows the M*TIF developer to ``fake out'' the Intrinsics, and replace the true instance variable values with modified values. Alternatively, the toolkit may prefer to transform a user specified value into something more palatable by the toolkit.

The more common usage of synthetic resources is to support resolution independence (see figure ). However, the toolkit developers also realized that the mechanism provided a way to protect ``delicate'' resources. For example, those that it would be dangerous for the user to change, or those that would upset the toolkit if they were unexpectedly modified.

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Motif Programming By A. D. Marshall

Motif Programming

By A. D. Marshall

This book introduces the fundamentals of Motif programming and addreses wider issues concerning the X Window system. The aim of this book is to provide a practical introduction to writing Motif programs. The key principles of Motif programming are always supported by example programs.

The X Window system is very large and this book does not attempt to detail every aspect of either X or Motif. This book is not intended to be a complete reference on the subject.

The book is organised into logical parts, it begins by introducing the X Window system and Motif and goes on to study individual components in detail in specific Chapters. In the remainder of this Chapter we concentrate on why Motif and related areas are important and give a brief history of the development of Motif.

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Overview of Motif 2.0

Overview of Motif 2.0

The Open Group © 1995-2005

opengroup.org

Five years after its appearance on the market, OSF/Motif has become the major Graphical User Interface (GUI) technology for Open Systems, as well as a de jure standard (IEEE P1295). The previous version of OSF/Motif (Release 1.2) introduced major new features such as internationalization, drag-and-drop and tear-off menus. Those features were intended to allow application developers to produce interoperable, easy to use applications for a worldwide market. As a result, this technology has been selected to become the basis of the Common Desktop Environment jointly developed by HP, IBM, Novell and SunSoft, proposed to become an X/Open standard.

Every Motif release contains new features that help the end user community (e.g. drag and drop in 1.2) or the developer's community: programming features that are invisible from the end users but make developer's life much easier (e.g. representation types in 1.2). OSF Motif 2.0 is no exception. It includes items for developers such as the extensibility framework and the uniform transfer model, and extension for end users such as virtual screen support and workspace management. And it also contains new widgets that actually serve both the end user community and the programmers.

For end users, Motif 2.0 presents the following new features reviewed in this paper:

• virtual screen support
• workspace management
• new widgets increasing ease of use and providing more direct manipulation of application objects.

For software developers, Motif 2.0 provides:

• the extensibility framework. The Motif toolkit is based on the Xt object-oriented framework. As such it presents the major capabilities of object oriented systems, such as inheritance. But the truth is, a developer needs a hard-gained knowledge and experience with Motif to implement a subclass of a Motif widget with the Motif look and feel. It actually requires the developer to have access to the Motif source code itself.

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