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The Superior Motif?
Janon writes: "There's a rather interesting interview with Antony Fountain, a Motif developer and reference manual author at O'Reilly. He makes some rather well-founded (or at least it seems so to me) claims that Motif has some rather important advantages over the likes of GTK+ and Qt, such as an open and superior component model." It's a great illustration of the split between open and closed development, too -- fans of the Bazaar may see only waste in Fountains assertion that "Millions of lines of Motif get written and not one word about it leaves the company doors."
I write a lot of my programs using Motif. However, it (along with Xt and Xlib which you must also learn to be an effective X/Motif programmer) is so involved to learn that I wouldn't have bothered had GTK or Qt been out when I started developing under X. If young developers -- the ones who often have cool, exciting ideas -- aren't learning Motif, it is for all intents and purposes dead.
That said, EditRES is very saucy. If you're running Netscape 4 now, fire up "editres", do a "Get Tree" on Netscape, and start changing colors, labels, and even layout and behaviors. [Then start coding that functionality for Qt or GTK.]
DanAt the time I used a memory debugger called "purify", that detected all sorts of memory errors (acesses out of bunds, buffer overruns, buffer underruns, acesses to dealocated blocks, memory leaks, etc.), and It reported thousands of errors inside the motif libraries.
There were all kinds of errors from memory blocks accessed after being freed to memory leaks.
The problem was so bad that even the documentation from "purify" had a paragraph explaining how to filter the error messages caused by the Motif code, because otherwise it was impossible to spot our own bugs.
I beleive that this problem still persists today and this is one of the reasons that explains why Netscape Navigator keeps crashing so many times.
Right now, I'm porting all my applications to GTK+ with the help of Glade.
So far, I'm using "njamd" as a memory debugger and it doesn't detect any problems ou memory leaks.
Previous /. Discussion here
The interview takes a rather dark tone WRT GTK and QT. It's clear that Fountain likes Motif, but at the expense of his own vision.
He doesn't offer any interesting insight why motif is neccessarily better, other than: "We can write proprietary applications and people won't talk about them".
Well, duh! You can write proprietary apps with any widget manager you like! GTK isn't encumbered with any legal virii.
If Joe Schmoe Corporation wanted to make a GTK interface for an internal CVS repository application, then they can.
He acts as if using GTK automatically entitles the GTK group to announce your application on Slashdot and toot their own horns. I'll give you a clue: It's the app builders that toot horns, not the GTK peeps.
If Joe Schmoe Corporation doesn't want their horn tooted, then they'll just keep the shut up!
The reality of the situation is that Motif only exists because of corporations that believe they have to use a proprietary, expensively licensed, widget library in their applications, or they won't be taken seriously.
I seem to recall that Netscape first built on Linux, unencumbered, when LessTif was stable enough to permit linking. That was because LessTif was trying to mimick the Motif API in Open Source. Then GTK came along and it seems the drive behind Lesstif is lessened.
Don't let the FUD mongers that want to see Motif remain a cash cow distract companies from using GTK or QT as their widget of choice.
I spent a couple of years doing heavy duty Motif development, and can assure you it's the most bug ridden piece of crap you can imagine. It's also got a lame widget set.
I downloaded Qt, and from knowing nothing about it was up and writing my own widgets in a few hours - it's an excellent API and widget set, not to mention QtDesigner vs things like the Motif designer UIM/X which was expensive as hell and followed in Motif's tradition of bugginess.
Sorry - experience says it's no contest. Qt wins.
I did Motif devel for 6 years, I switched to GTK about 3 years ago. Here's why:
... a very simple rewrite for GTK brought load times down by a factor of 10 (ten ... TEN)
API -- GTK has a much, much nicer programmer interface; if you're coding stuff by hand, it's about 1/2 the number of lines (guess)
speed -- Motif pays a huge price for Xt. One of my apps makes a whole bunch of widgets when it loads a file
open source -- developing for a widget set which you have the source to is just lovely. With Motif, if something didn't work the way you expected, you had to spend hours trying different stuff at random. With GTK, you can see what's wrong, and how to fix it.
simplicity -- GTK is much simpler than Motif, and it's much easier to write your own widgets. The object model is much better. Signals rock. Within a few hours of starting GTK, I subclassed one of the standard GTK widgets and modified its behaviour; fantastic. Xt makes subclassing widgets difficult.
range of widgets -- GTK has a much better range of standard widgets. At the end of the interview, Fountain says he's updated his new edition to cover the latest widgets, such as the ComboBox and the Notebook. Good grief!
portability -- amazingly, not all Motifs are equal. If you want to write an app which can run on most versions of IRIX, HP-UX, Solaris, etc. you can only rely on quite a small part of Motif. This is an incredible and enormous pain. With GTK, you can just say "needs 1.2.10 or better", and if the user doesn't have that, they can download and build. They don't need to go through their vendor to get the toolkit. This is less of a problem now that Motif has opened up a bit, to be fair.
portability -- because GTK wraps Xlib, I can recompile my app, and it'll run on Winders.
Fountain is right on i18n being a current lag point for GTK. GTK2.0 (due out fairly soon (less than six months? not sure)) will include stuff like pango. This will jump GTK quite a way ahead of Motif on i18n.
On introspection, GTK has had this for years, I'm not sure what Fountain is talking about here.
I've not used Qt, no doubt similar stuff can be said.
As long as there is nothing that replaces the network transparence of X, it is not going to be replaced! Even the Linux-PDA from agenda computing decided to put X in that tiny machine. Once you have made a TCP/IP connection via PPP from your Linux desktop, you can remotely display the agenda's X-window apps on your host computer, which is very cool and useful. Sending the whole screen bitmaps (a la laplink type of software for Windows) would be way too slow and would not take advantage of larger display size and resolution of your desktop. X-window does such things transparently.
I'm convinced that X-window will even be in embedded devices. There is no need for embedded Qt.
I'm sure lots of lines of Cobol are still being written behind closed doors, in dirty little rooms filled with sterile programmers and clamorous machines, but I wouldn't offer that as an argument for its relevance (or its superiority over Java). Popularity is often a red herring in a debate of merits; if it were one we bought into, we'd all be running Windows.
Whether Xt is still important/relevant is debatable. Heck, people argue that X is antiquated and not relevant to modern networks and desktop systems.
Ultimately, though, Qt and GTK/GNOME are in their infancy compared to Motif, as Fountain points out. The moral of the interview, component models and all aside, is that, yes, Motif is not dead, but, yes, it's stake is being usurped by the next generation. My grandma writes Motif.
Personally, my favorite quote in the interview is, "There are things Qt in particular does better than Motif: it is nicer to program with, for example."
Oh yeah, my grandma's dead, by the way.