Application Development with Wafe

What is Wafe ?

Rapid prototyping environment based on Tcl [10].
Basic functionality is implemented completely in C, over 70% thereof generated by a C-Code generator.
Supports demand loading of components under Linux.
Originally developed for GUI-based applications in X-11 environment, meanwhile support for many non-GUI-related components (such as libwww, SSLeay, LDAP).
Does not provide its own look-and-feel (like Tk [11]), but does integrate a broad variety of GUI-components.
Publicly available from ftp://ftp.wu-wien.ac.at/pub/src/X11/wafe/.

The Components of Wafe

Athena and Motif libraries are mutually exclusive (binaries called wafe and mofe).
Supported libraries can be obtained from ftp://ftp.wu-wien.ac.at/pub/src/X11/wafe/ as well.
Complete description of packages and associated commands in the Wafe reference manual [9].
Binary distribution for Linux (includes a statically bound Motif binary).

Wafe and Cineast

Cineast's application control is implemented in MIT's object oriented Tcl (OTcl [12]).
Current version of Cineast contains little as about 2400 lines of OTcl code
(less than 1% of the C-code used for implementing the core components) and no special C code.
User inteface is based on the OSF/Motif widget set.
Rendering of HTML text is provided by the Kino widget class.
Networkin functionality is provided by libwww (Version 5.0a).

Using Wafe

#!/usr/bin/X11/mofe --f

XmRowColumn rc topLevel orientation horizontal
  XmTextField  f rc modifyVerifyCallback {puts "Char: %s"}
  XmPushButton q rc activateCallback quit

realize

Primary requirements for GUI compontents: familiarity with the widget set.
Most of the work is in configuration of widgets by specifying some of their attributes (see example above) and putting the widgets into a widget tree. The XmTextField widgetclass has 28 new attributes in addition to the inherited ones!
Note the use of handler procedures (callbacks) and percent-substitution within the handler.


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