Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 07/27/2002 - 13:14. General Questions
Hi,
I?m new to X programming and I was looking for a free GUI toolkit wich I can developer commercial applications. I can do it with OpenMotif?
Wed, 06/27/2012 - 13:19
#1
Developing commercial software with OpenMotif
Yes! the target systems need to have the shared libraries, too.
Absolutly, if you stick to strait Motif your applications will build on all unix platforms. as dbl says, you must make sure that
1) the platforms you wish to run on have the libraries (libXm.so.x)
or
you can build your application with the static library (libXm.a)
and all will be well. either way there should be no problem
jim
Hmm....
Extrapolating from the upper two responses...
X is pretty big, wonderful, still growing.
You might be hard pressed to "learn X" with nothing but free software and free documentation. The "big picture" and "where the action is" is difficult to ascertain from these.
If your not "already" a GUI programmer you might want to start of with that free neat Java kit w/IDE. Very GQ.
Another choice is Gnome. Its free too. You`ll incurr a learning curve to get things going with that since you`ll have to set it up *before* trying any examples.
The "real X" people really are writing apps in Java (some apps).
Java is a C++ language using typical GUI APIs and tends to have support problems in some areas. Good for browser pluggins too.
You`ll need X for multimedia projects or games.
I`ll say Motif top as a solid and workable computing base. But I don`t think there are any free developement kits.
One "free" Motif thing I used was a GUI builder that automatically generated working C code. It was free in Solaris - but that`s only a glimpse of what a good Motif setup offers for a developer - and as a complete multinational computing base.
A good motif kit can spin of a powerful unix connected app quick and also offers extreme widget auto-management scenarios (like auto-resizing neighbor aware widgets that you don`t have to code). Motif has widget sets (plugin objects) available - not necessarily free... for many many things.
Bad news for MS monopolism competition, lock ups, cost.
Good news for `nix you can distribute your reliable solution in a 2U without those commercial licensing fees )