RE: Just gotta know - does anyone use CLIM ... ???

To be fair, the folks who came up with CLIM adopted the LAG Xerox windowing model, and fully intended that code using CLIM morph to appear as a "native" application under whatever system it was running on, following standard user interface guidelines depending on the host. While I expect that power is in the abstract layer, the actual work of the lower layers to do that for each host system was probably not done (and I'm not sure if it was supposed to be done by vendors or the CLIM team itself). So what you have is everyone getting up the original code to make things look like a LispM, because that was the first host, rather than something native to the actual environment it was being sold on.

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bradshaw [mailto:tfb@cley.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 11:43 AM
To: Friedrich Dominicus
Cc: lisp-hug@xanalys.com
Subject: Re: Just gotta know - does anyone use CLIM ... ???


CLIM,
after all, is really just an attempt to write something that works
like Genera but uses CLOS instead of Flavors, and runs on top of other
window systems (which really meant X11 at the time it was written).
Well, that's cool, and there were nice things in the Genera window
system, but it didn't work *anything like* the way people expect GUIs
to work now.  What end users actually want is applications which work
pretty much like all the other Windows/Motif/Gnome/etc applications
work. What they really *don't* want is something that looks like a
LispM - you may, I may, but end users don't.  So, lo and behold, the
vendors are producing things like CAPI which lets you write mildly
windowsy applications without running through enormous hoops.