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Re: CLIM on the Mac

    Date: Mon, 21 Jan 91 16:08:54 cst
    From: Rodney Daughtrey <rodney@huntsai.boeing.com>
	    Date: Sat, 19 Jan 91 17:15:52 -0500
	    From: Bill Anderson <waander@cs.umd.edu>
	
	       What can you tell me about CLIM on the Mac.  Since I know nothing
	    now, I would appreciate any information you can render.  Thank You,
	
	      Bill Andersen
	      waander@cs.umd.edu
	
    I, too, and several others I know of would also appreciate more
    information concerning the Macintosh version of CLIM.  Specifically:


    * What is the best estimate (realistically, please) for the release
      date of CLIM for the Mac?

    * How much will it cost?

    * What capabilities/level of programming will be available in the
      initial release?  Will it be at the level of current ObjectLisp
      GUI programming on the Mac under MACL?


    A response from someone at ILA (official or not) would be greatly
    appreciated!
  
 

    Rodney Daughtrey           E-mail: rodney@huntsai.boeing.com
    Huntsville AI Center               {major site}!uw-beaver!bcsaic!huntsai!rodney
    Boeing Computer Services   Voice:  (205)-461-2352  Fax: (205)-461-2933


(Allow me to respond to both of these at once, no slight intended to
Bill.)

CLIM for the Mac is now available from ILA for very limited external
test and evaluation.  The only hitch is that you have to have access to
the alpha version of Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp 2.0 from Apple, which
is not yet generally available.  

If you have MACL 2.0.something, and want to take part in the evaluation,
contact us directly at the addresses listed at the end of this message.

The full commercial release date is somewhat more problematic, since it
is tied to Apple's release of MACL 2, which (we are told) is tied to
MacOS 7, which has been slipping for over a year now.  I think a realistic
timetable is Mac CLIM beta sometime in late Q1, FCS late Q3/early Q4.

Pricing will be somewhere between that for MACL and that for, say,
Flavors or PCL from APDA, or some number of hundreds of dollars.  (In
other words, pricing and distribution are not set yet.)

As for the capabilities of CLIM, that's a very long story.  CLIM on the
Mac uses the underlying MACL GUI toolkit to implement the generic UI
features specified by the CLIM API, and available in all complete
implementations of CLIM, which fall roughly into the following layers
(bottom to top):

	* basic geometry
	* graphics and other basic output
	* basic input (keyboard and pointer handling)
	* window management (exposure, stacking, sizing, etc...)

	* output recording
	* presentations
	* context-sensitive input
	* formatted output
	* application-building tools (commands, frames)

	* generic gadget toolkit

The reasons-for-being of CLIM are portability and high-level constructs
for UI programming in Common Lisp (which includes CLOS).

Regards,

Mark Son-Bell
ILA
114 Mt. Auburn St.
4th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138
phone: +617/576-1151
fax: +617/576-2806
e-mail: clim-ila@ila.com

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