[lug] GUI Development?

[rm at mamma.varadinet.de]

On Sat, Feb 03, 2001 at 12:52:34PM -0700, David Morris wrote:
> I have a project that I need to develop a GUI for, and I am looking
> for books, guides, and/or development tools to help me out as I have
> limited experience in LINUX/UNIX GUIs.
> 
> Here is what I need:
> 
> A GUI that will run under Solaris 2.5 on a Sparc processor.  Window
> manager is Motif.
> 
> It would be useful if the GUI could be developed and run on a LINUX
> system as well where Motif is not available (Debian 2.2).

Motif is available for Linux as well, both free and with
commercial support (Metrolink will sell you Motif for example,
the free version can be downloaded at: http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/,
but read their licence agreement). You'll find plenty of literature on
Motif in the bookstores and there are some nice (but expensive) GUI builders
arround. I'm not too much of a Motif fan myself so i can't really recomend
ind. books.

> What tools would people recommend?  The Solaris/Sparc/Motif
> requirement is fixed.  The Linux requirement would be a nice addition,
> but not required.

Since Sun anounced it's move towards the GNOME desktop you might want
to have a look at the Gtk framework. The Glade GUI-builder is a very
nice tool to work. It saves it's project files as XML data that can
be used together with libglade to build GUIs on the fly. This make
prototyping very easy. Test your GUI with a scripting language such
as Perl ar Guile and build the final application in C.
(Note: both Motif and Gtk are C-based. There are Gtk-Bindings for a
lot of other languages ranging from Perl/Python to ADA or Objective C
or even C++). 

> What Books on the subject of LINUX/UNIX GUIs can everyone recommend?
For Gtk i would suggest to start with the online tutorial at
http://www.gtk.org/tutorial/ (this should also be in the Debian distribution,
package name is 'libgtk1.2-doc').
read Havoc Penningtons book 'GTK+/Gnome Application Development' wich is 
open source and can be downloaded from 'http://developer.gnome.org/doc/GGAD/GGAD.tar.gz'
but i think it's worth buing (published by New Riders Publishing, ISBN 0-7357-0078-8).
The same publisher has a Gtk book by Eric Harlow. Recently other publishers 
released Gtk/GNOME books as well. You might want to spend an afternoon at the
bookshop and browse.

Ralf Mattes