The Widget Factory

The OSF/Motif and other similar toolkits of X Intrinsics widgets provide the GUI developer with a set of building blocks from which to construct their interface. In recent years WYSI WYG user interface building tools have appeared for the rapid assembly of complete user in terfaces (including dynamic behavior) from components of the toolkit. As a result, the cost of GUI development has been dramatically reduced and the quality and the consistency of soft ware have increased.

Toolkits such as OSF/Motif however, do not provide the range and variety of base objects (widgets) or of dynamic graphics the GUI developer may need to best present information re lated to the application. Specialized objects may be needed, for example, to display a break down of regional sales figures in a bar graph, to display a boiler temperature reading on a thermometer dial, or to display more complex animations required for the visualization of complex data such as animated maps, charts or diagrams. An overly strict use of only standard graphic components may well lead to poorer quality GUIs, limited in their overall effective ness.

Bridging the "Toolkit Gap"

The solution to this shortfall has been to augment the capabilities of the chosen toolkit by add ing new widget classes. Developers had two options: using third party sources, or developing new widgets themselves. Some excellent third party widgets have emerged on the market, both from commercial firms (e.g. graphing widgets from KL Group and INT) or from public do main contributors, in response to this demand. However, widget developers are only going to produce what they can sell. Thus the further a GUI developer's requirements deviate from the 'norms' offered by the marketplace, the more a compromise must be made.

As the level of compromise increases, developers might start to consider the second option which is to design and write the required widgets themselves. This requires specialist and po tentially expensive skills and, because it is essentially a programming activity, is intrinsically slow and so will probably have a negative effect on the overall development cost and time scale.

A third approach is now possible using a software product called the Widget Factory from Non Standard Logics (NSL).