Submitted by “The OpenMotif Project Team announced today the release of OpenMotif 2.3, marking the most significant version of OpenMotif since it was released to the open source community in May 2000. OpenMotif 2.3 includes major feature enhancements and over 25 bug fixes requested by developers of enterprise applications. OpenMotif is the publicly licensed version of Motif, the industry standard user interface toolkit for UNIX systems provided on more than 200 hardware and software platforms including HP, IBM, Sun, SGI, and Linux (Red Hat and Novell SUSE).”
Who in their right mind would use motif in todays GUI oriented day? I want eyecandy and motif is such an eyesore of a GUI (IMNSHO) that I can’t believe that work is still being done on it. Ugrh!
Lots of people. Its APIs are the same cross platform and don’t change much which equals lower cost of maintaining your app. Ya, it’s not pretty but motif is still popular and tons of legacy apps still use it.
Scientific applications, high reliability environments, etc.
Anywhere performance, simplicity, and memory usage is valued over eyecandy. That and anywhere you need backwards compatibility.
“Anywhere performance, simplicity, and memory usage is valued over eyecandy. That and anywhere you need backwards compatibility.”
Oh god, as a poor soul that grew up programming this monstruosity 10+ yrs ago I never thought that CS would de-evolve to such a point where what you just said actually is justified.
When motif came out, it was such a bloated hideous pig of a framework that sometimes we had to hack somethings directly on the x-toolkit (which was an even more hideous thing, but slightly less bloated). It was fun to see some motif widgets bring to its knees a $30K+ workstation :-). Man, how things change…. now this bloated pig is considered “light”
When motif came out, it was such a bloated hideous pig of a framework that sometimes we had to hack somethings directly on the x-toolkit (which was an even more hideous thing, but slightly less bloated). It was fun to see some motif widgets bring to its knees a $30K+ workstation :-). Man, how things change…. now this bloated pig is considered “light”
Yes, but isn’t the fact that Motif is now considered “light” sad?
“Scientific applications, high reliability environments, etc.”
Would you give control over your weak life functions to an ICU (intensive care unit) that is controlled by a “Vista” PC just because the nurse wants eyecandy, wobbling windows and dancing elephants? 🙂
No, honestly: Motif is still interesting in contexts where developers of high specialized software (evaluation of computer tomographies, somnology laboratory, automated blood lab analysis etc.) need to rely on the presence of a special GUI base framework, because their software needs to be able to be installed and run on a Sun, IBM or SGI machine.
Motif is simplicistic, minimal and functional in many regards (surely not in memory usage), it offers a high grade of compatibility between OSes and therefore hardware systems.
It is used everywhere where eyecandy explicitly is a no-issue, where users do concentrate on content, not on form. Form does not beat content. 🙂
Luckily, it’s not that the world does just consist of x86 PCs and “Windows”… 🙂
And further think of this way: If you want to make an app that you know has to run on HP-UX, Solaris or OpenVMS, then ya, you’ll use Motif.
I’m curious as to whether this is still valid.
Haven’t GTK ant Qt been ported to HP , AIX,
etc?
I don’t think they are linux or x86 only
No the aren’t but on the other hand they lack a lot of quality even in Linux.
Haven’t GTK ant Qt been ported to HP , AIX, etc?
I think Qt certainly runs on AIX now, because IBM sponsored some work to get KDE up and running on it some while back. As for GTK, there was some big noise about HP defaulting to Gnome on a lot of their stuff some while back that seems to have gone quiet.
I would imagine they’ve both been ported quite widely now.
However, there’s still a ton of stuff using Motif and it just shows the importance of backwards compatibility and looking after what is already there.
Edited 2007-06-28 08:38
I’m actually using OpenMotif at work right now (on a Solaris-machine).
Sure, it doesn’t look great and the usability could always be better.. But it -works-. No-nonsense, and the job gets done. Although I do miss wobbly windows…
Edited 2007-06-28 06:16
AFAIK, it’s a breach to the OpenGroup license to use OpenMotif on Solaris, as it’s a closed-source OS.
It might be legitimate to use OpenMotif on OpenSolaris, however.
“AFAIK, it’s a breach to the OpenGroup license to use OpenMotif on Solaris, as it’s a closed-source OS. ”
Solaris comes with all the normal motif libraries, I don’t think openmotif is needed.
If one’s happy with Motif 2.1 API, then, of course, it’s right.
Motif 2.3, has some extensions, however 🙂
On a slightly related note, there has been some progress on the petition to fully open source Motif. This would erase the problem of running OpenMotif on closed source platforms (solaris, aix etc).
http://www.marutan.net/cde/
The people from OpenMotif.org have been very supportive of this effort.
Peter, it’s great news!
Thank you much for the work you’ve done!