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.
