Re: CLIM vendor for MCL

[cfry@MIT.EDU (Christopher Fry)]

> Someone tell me the vendor (name, address) and price of CLIM for MCL?
Lucid in Menlo Park, CA. I think its about $500 but you should talk to 
them directly. 

>I have an MCL application that I want to port to an SGI machine with a
>Franz CLOS/CLIM environment.  Does anyone know if there are portable
>versions (e.g. CLIM) of MCL's GUI interface functions (e.g. those for
>window, views, dialogs) available?  This will save me the time of
>having to rewrite the GUI code in CLIM.

This is the BIG problem. CLIM 2.0 will have the ability to
support mac-like dialog items, etc though the beta version from
Lucid for the Mac isn't due until spring 93.
Even with 2.0, there's problably a bunch a widget work to do to
support all the MCL window system stuff we know and love.

Even with all of that a port will not be trivial. It will be more like a
total rewrite of the GUI part of your code, but at least a rewrite in a 
language that stands a chance of giving you the support you need.

A dark horse candidate for porting MCL apps is Quorum's  'Equal" product 
that some day is supposed to be able to take any Mac application and 
run it on a variety of Unix machines, unchanged. I'm taking about the 
actual binary application, without recompilation.
My last message from Quarum said they hoped to ship Equal 1st quarter 
93. This is tricky  technology so don't hold your breath. My guess is 
that some extra work will have to be done to get MCL apps to work, just 
because they can't think of everything. Still, that solution would be 
easiest for MCL users. 

Quorum has mentioned SGI Indigo in their literature for their other 
product, "Latitude", so I'd be surprised if they're not planning an
SGI version of Equal.

Quarum is also in Menlo Park, CA, 415 323-3111