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O'Reilly Motif Books On-Line and Free

Posted by timothy on from the paperless-office-of-the-future dept.

MightyMicro writes "According to the Motifdeveloper community site, the O'Reilly Motif Programming Manual and Reference Guide are now available for free download from Imperial Software's site. As Open Motif is also free for Linux (and xBSD), this looks like a valuable resource."

10 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Why people don't use Motif by Adrian+Voinea · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A lot of people are very hesitant to install a whole set of libraries to run only one application -- almost no matter how good the app is -- when there are 'good enough' alternatives for the standard libs they already have.

    Do you feel that NEdit has suffered from not using more popular libraries, and does it matter to you?

    1. Re:Why people don't use Motif by Zeinfeld · · Score: 2, Interesting
      A lot of people are very hesitant to install a whole set of libraries to run only one application -- almost no matter how good the app is -- when there are 'good enough' alternatives for the standard libs they already have.

      The main reason that Mosaic was the first mega successful Web browser was that it was the first to use a GUI toolkit that did not look like crap. It was not actually the first Motif browser but it was the first with Motif look and feel. The other browsers looked like science projects.

      Ten years later it is quite possible that Motif's time has come and gone. The Motif look is somewhat dated and the OSF licensing model is certainly dated. Unless it was released as open source sometime I didn't notice you still have to pay for Motif which pretty much rules it out in the Linux world. I don't think that the chances of survival for the non-open source Unix world are very good these days.

      What puzzles me is that these toolkits still need a rack of twenty manuals each of which is six inches thick. Its only a goddam menu system!

      --
      Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
      Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
    2. Re:Why people don't use Motif by iainf · · Score: 2, Informative

      Unless it was released as open source sometime I didn't notice you still have to pay for Motif which pretty much rules it out in the Linux world.

      You must have been asleep! It's available for free, but under conditions, and RMS doesn't like the licence...

      http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/license/
      http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motif.html

  2. One thing that Motif was getting right... by Adrian+Voinea · · Score: 3, Informative

    One more thing...
    Last time I used Motif (about 2 years ago, on Irix) was that it had a working and fairly powerful drag and drop. Granted, they changed the API right in the middle of things, which sucked, but I could (and did) write an application where any user could drag "film rolls" (an object in our system) onto the desktop, and then drag them from the desktop into other programs that knew something about "film rolls" and that program could process the film roll. Programs that didn't know anything about film roll object just got the file name where the film roll was stored, but applications that knew about film rolls got all sorts of other characteristics of the film roll in the drop message without opening the file.

    I haven't figured out how to do similar dragging and dropping on the desktop or between applications with KDE or Gnome. I'm pretty sure it's there, but it doesn't seem as integrated as it did on Irix.

  3. Does anyone like Motif? by MrBlack · · Score: 2

    Whenever I feel like a good laugh, or reading the work of particularly gifted flamers I fire up /. an do a search for Motif....does ANYONE like it?

    1. Re:Does anyone like Motif? by Arandir · · Score: 2

      I'm an experienced Qt programmer, but I am giving serious thought into switching to Motif. Why? Because Qt is becoming a huge bloated monster. Compare the sizes of qt-1.0, qt-2.0 and qt-3.0. The trend is unmistakable. I'd switch to GTK+, but it's not that far behind Qt in the bloat race. There are other suitable toolkits, but only Motif is any sort of standard.

      --
      A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  4. Re:A valuable resource for whom? by elflord · · Score: 3, Informative
    The other comment is obviously false, maybe the other poster is thinking of Solaris workstations that have very primitive graphics hardware.

    However, there's no comparison between Motif and. KDE has a distributed object model, a solid foundation (Qt), and a rich set of widgets, including everything Qt provides (including collection classes, network support, and XML support), and KDEs add-ons. Because it's usable in OO languages, extending and adding widgets is a piece of cake.

    Cheers,

  5. Re:A valuable resource for whom? by cboscari · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Here is a link that I thought was interesting, written by the guy who updated the 6b volume on what he thinks the adavantages over QT and GTK are.
    http://unix.oreilly.com/news/motif_0400.html

    I think his point about legacy code and the fact the Motif is on every UNIX is dead on. You may not like Motif, but odds are your employer might.

  6. Motif? by DGolden · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not that I like motif in particular , but one thing that it gets right and that Qt and Gtk suck at is using the X Window System to its full advantage.

    Motif apps, like netscape 4.x, tend to support established X mechanisms for things - like the X resource database (a very good generalised application preferences database, somewhat akin to the windows registry, but less sucky and more human-readable) - they tend to support the editres protocol, they generally integrate better with the X window system Xt infrastructure. Qt and Gtk go off and implement their own half-assed preferences systems and ignore the solid work that exists in X (presumably because Qt and to some extent Gtk are intended to work well on non-X platforms)

    It's almost as if the toolkit authors went off and started implementing their toolkits without bothering to study how X had already solved 3/4 of their problems...

    If you still have ns 4.x or other motif applications around, fire it up, fire up editres, and have a play around - the end-user dynamic configuation abilities are more still more advanced than either Qt or Gtk, and the only other toolkit that I can think of that is comparably easily end-user configurable at runtime is amiga MUI (and xaw, but that starts out looking quite crappy.)

    --
    Choice of masters is not freedom.
  7. Re:A valuable resource for whom? by elflord · · Score: 2
    Here is a link that I thought was interesting, written by the guy who updated the 6b volume on what he thinks the adavantages over QT and GTK are. http://unix.oreilly.com/news/motif_0400.html

    That was an interesting article. I'm sure Motif won't die any time soon, because there is a lot of code out there that uses it. But tradition will only keep it alive for so long, and for new projects, it's likely to get dumped. Also, some of the comments about Qt are just dead wrong. Qt is not just used to write "software for programmers", in fact the KDE and QT APIs are designed to make it easy to write user friendly software. Qt is actually used for in-house Windows development, and that's how TT make some of their money. His "no documenation" comment is completely wrong. Every class and every method in Qt is documented, and there are also several tutorials and books. And there have been for years. I can see Motif championing legacy applications, but for new projects, Qt is a much more appealing product.

    On internationalization, Qt supports Unicode, and GTK is more recently catching up on this.