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CLIM
Contact: Susan Zellmann-Rohrer
Symbolics, Inc.
(617) 221-1000
Sterling Hager
Sterling Hager, Inc.
(617) 259-1400
Teddy Rosenberg
Lucid, Inc.
(415) 329-8400
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Leading Vendors Announce Support For
Portable Lisp User Interface Management System
BURLINGTON, Mass., June 14, 1989 -- Symbolics, Inc., and Lucid, Inc.
the leading vendors of Lisp systems, today announced plans to support the
Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM), a powerful, high-level, object-oriented
user interface management system.
This announcement addresses the two main bottlenecks in applications
development: the difficulty in creating window-based applications with current
low-level window systems; and the difficulty in making these applications portable
across operating systems and hardware. CLIM is not a competing window system, but
a layer on top of a window system that takes on the host system's look and feel,
such as OPENLOOK(tm) or Motif(tm).
To promote standardization, and ensure portability, negotiations are
underway to have International Lisp Associates, Inc., (ILA) provide implementations
to interested Lisp vendors. ILA will coordinate the development of the CLIM
specification which will be submitted to the ANSI Common Lisp Committee when
complete.
CLIM is the result of a cooperative design effort among Symbolics,
Lucid, ILA and Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In
particular, PARC research has developed fundamental new insight into the
design of architectures that provide flexible and efficient support of a
wide range of user interface functionality.
PARC research Gregor Kiczales said, "The Common Lisp Interface
Manager incorporates design concepts from Silica, PARC's Lisp-based window
system kernel. Silica embodies our latest thinking on window system design.
The power of this design comes from a novel use of object orientation to
explicitly manipulate the fundamental concepts in the window system kernel.
This approach, which we call a meta level architecture, makes it possible
to provide application portability without dictating look and feel or
compromising functionality or performance. Silica's meta level architecture
is similar to the metaobject protocol we have developed for the Common
Lisp Object System (CLOS)."
In commenting on the announcement, Richard Karash, Symbolics'
vice president, marketing, said, "The need for standards is clear. The
Lisp community has already solved two of the hardest problems:
standardization of the base language (Common Lisp), and standardization
of the object system (CLOS). By standardizing the user interface
management system (CLIM), Lisp can now provide application developers
with greatly enhanced portability."
Richard P. Gabriel, Lucid's chief technical officer added, "There
has been a lot of good work lately on window system standards. Most of
this work has been focused on low-level systems like X. CLIM takes
advantage of the X standard but goes further to provide a complete set
of powerful tools for writing complex window-based applications.
"Our aim is to create a new user interface management system
standard for Lisp, while taking advantage of the existing investment
in low-level window system standards such as X." said William M.
York, ILA principal. "We are starting with the support of two of
the largest vendors in the Lisp market and we expect to have others
join us soon. This will make it possible to provide a standard
system to all Lisp users."
Pricing and availability for the Common Lisp Interface
Manager will be announced at a later date.
Symbolics, Inc., headquartered in Burlington, Mass., and
with operations in Chatsworth, Calif., is the leading provider
of symbolic processing systems used for the development and
delivery of expert systems, computer aided software engineering
(CASE), computer aided design and engineering (CAD/CAE) and
advanced image generation and processing.
Lucid, Inc., headquartered in Menlo Park, CA., is a
leading supplier of Common Lisp software products running on
general-purpose computers.
Motif is a trademark of the Open Software Foundation.
OPEN LOOK is a trademark of AT&T. Symbolics is a trademark of
Symbolics, Inc. Lucid is a trademark of Lucid, Inc.
1989 ###
Contact: Susan Zellmann-Rohrer
Symbolics, Inc.
(617) 221-1000
Sterling Hager
Sterling Hager, Inc.
(617) 259-1400
Teddy Rosenberg
Lucid, Inc.
(415) 329-8400
Product Backgrounder
Symbolics Supports New Object-Oriented
User Interface Management Standard
The Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM) is a high-level,
object-oriented user interface management system that sits on top
of existing window systems such as Microsoft Windows(tm) and OPEN
LOOK (tm), and takes on the look and feel of specifications such
as Motif(tm). It enables application portability among many different
environments. CLIM was developed as a joint project between several
leading vendors: Symbolics, Inc., Lucid, Inc., International Lisp
Associates, Inc., and Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC).
CLIM allows Symbolics' customers to develop powerful, and
now portable, user interfaces under Genera, our leading object-
oriented development environment. The availability of CLIM extends
the range of industry standard delivery solutions available to
Symbolics' users. CLIM is available on all Symbolics' workstations:
the Symbolics 3600(tm) series, the MacIvory(tm) and the XL400(tm).
CLIM Allows True Portability Across Operating Systems and Hardware
The cooperative support by multiple vendors on this product,
in conjunction with CLOS (Common Lisp Object System) and Common Lisp,
allows customers to create applications with robust functionality
and portability to a wide range of technical workstations.
Traditionally, Lisp users have had to solve the portability
problem themselves by creating their own layer of code to connect
their applications to underlying user interface systems. The cost
and difficulty of maintaining and porting this layer to new window
systems has been a significant disadvantage for Lisp users. With
CLIM, the need for users to maintain such code is eliminated.
Today CLIM supports workstations running X-Windows(tm) and
QuickDraw(tm). Currently other vendors of LISP based products are
being actively recruited to support this standard. In addition,
CLIM will be submitted to the ANSI Common Lisp Committee.
CLIM Can Support the Look and Feel of its Host System
An application written using CLIM will also support
"chameleon" mode interactions offering the ability to adopt
the look and feel of the host window environment, or present
a distinctive interaction style across all host environments.
This is important to users since many applications need to
have the look and feel of current applications on the same
workstation. This mode is likely to have better run-time
performance since it is using the native user interface
system directly.
CLIM includes graphical drawing capabilities,
output recording, scrolling of histories, presentations,
input context, mouse sensitivity, presentation types
with inheritance, an input editor, a command processor,
completion facilities, table formatting and menu facilities.
###
Microsoft Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
OPEN LOOK is a trademark of AT&T. Symbolics, Symbolics 3600,
MacIvory, and XL400 are trademarks and Genera is a registered
trademark of Symbolics, Inc. X-Windows is a trademark of MIT.
QuickDraw is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. Lucid is a
trademark of Lucid, Inc.
Motif is a trademark of the Open Software Foundation.