WINTERP 2.0

The OSF/Motif WIDGET INTERPreter

by Niels Mayer

An interactive object-oriented user interface language for rapid prototyping, development and delivery of extensible applications with Motif GUIs and Xtango graphics/animation.

WINTERP News:

Niels Mayer recently released WINTERP 2.0 on the X Consortium's X11r6 "contrib" distribution. WINTERP is a rapid prototyping environment for creating and delivering GUI-based applications. It fills the same niche as TCL/TK, and Python, while employing more proven (and stable) underlying technologies. WINTERP uses a small, fast, object-oriented mini-Lisp interpreter based on XLISP-PLUS (David Betz, Tom Almy, Luke Tierney, et al), and has an object oriented interface to the OSF/Motif widget class hierarchy, and a combination of high-level object and functional interfaces to the Xtoolkit, Xlib, and underlying Unix system libraries. This environment significantly simplifies the construction of GUI-based applications, and makes these applications easier to modify and extend throughout the software life-cycle. It allows for the development of extensible applications in a safe execution environment -- errors in a new module won't destroy the whole system.

In addition to application develompent, WINTERP's features make it a good tool for learning about and experimenting with the capabilities of the OSF/Motif UI toolkit. Its rapid prototyping features allow UI and application designers to more easily play "what if" games with different interface styles.

WINTERP 2.0 new features:

  1. An improved Object Oriented Lisp (based on XLISP-PLUS by David Betz and Tom Almy);
  2. A high-level animation/graphics widget-class (based on Xtango by John Stasko) which lets you do the kinds of graphics that Motif ignores, without the tedium of Xlib-level programming;
  3. The ability to easily create new widget classes employing arbitrary graphical behavior without the tedium of programming in the Xt intrinsics and Xlib;
  4. Enable WINTERP-GUIs to communicate with multiple asynchronous, interactive unix subprocesses, facilitating the construction of GUI interfaces to existing line/terminal based programs. (This facility based on Don Libes' expect library);
  5. Table and XmGraph widgets;
  6. Lots of bugfixes, improvements, new examples, etc.

For more information...

Click here to see a brief blurb describing WINTERP.

Click here to read the WINTERP 2.0 README file.

WINTERP 2.0 Availability:

WINTERP 2.0 is available for free via anonymous ftp from the X Consortium (ftp.x.org:/contrib/devel_tools), and is also available on the X11r6 "contrib/Motif" distribution and on Prime Time Freeware for Unix CD-ROM (contact Rich Morin rdm@cfcl.com). The environment is complete and should compile "right out of the box" without porting on most Unix systems (Unix domain sockets and bsd networking preferred but not required, Motif 1.1 or 1.2 and X11r5 or X11r6 X libraries are required). WINTERP 2.0, within two weeks of it's release, has been reported to work on SGI Irix 5.2, HP HPUX 8.0 and 9.0 (s300,s400,s700,s800), SunOS 4.1.3 (using 'gcc', or using Sun's product 'cc' compiler), Sun Solaris 2.3 (with Sun's 2.3 SDK supplied Motif and compiler), DEC Ultrix 4.3, DEC OSF1 V2.0, NeXTStep 3.0 (with CoXist X/Motif), Linux (using 'gcc'), and AIX 3.2.5 on IBM RS6000 (using IBM's product 'cc').

Obtaining the WINTERP software distribution:

WINTERP documentation:

WINTERP examples:

Some old papers/publications describing WINTERP version 1.X:

For discussions on WINTERP, and to get details of upcoming releases, please join the WINTERP mailing list, by sending mail to winterp-request@netcom.com.

mayer@eit.com