The XFaceMaker Product Line

Introduction

The current state of the industry

The current state of the industry: There are 3 main types of X/Motif GUI builders on the market today.

- IDT (Interface Design Tool, or "screen painter" or "layout tool") excels at laying out the interface and at making first-time GUI developers feel at ease.

- UIMS (User Interface Management System) enables you to develop, test and maintain an interface, and reuse its components.

- Animator, facilitates the interactive generation of dynamic graphics to extend the capabilities of the Motif toolkit.

Specialized tools can also be used in conjunction with your GUI builder for creating Client/Server or Cross-Platform applications. For example, you may need a module to help build Motif interfaces for your Oracle, Sybase, Informix or CA-OpenIngres relational database. Perhaps you need a Cross-Platform development tool that allows you to develop in one environment and then port and deploy either to a native X/Motif or to a native Microsoft Windows environment, or both.

The problem:

Until now, no single vendor could provide a growth path from an IDT to a UIMS to an Animator GUI tool. When project requirements change, and they very often do, users have nowhere to go but to another vendor or, more likely, they keep the same tool and try to work around its limitations. If users move up to the next class of tool, they have to change vendors and lose their original investment in not only the tool itself, but in training, development time and maintenance.

Third Party widgets, classes and utilities have proliferated. Sophisticated developers need GUI solutions that are extensible and that can integrate these commercial or home grown custom, reusable widgets, classes and utilities. Developers want to be able to buy and/or build without proprietary risks and with scalable options.

The solution:

XFaceMaker Family

XFaceMaker ®, Europe's leading GUI Building Family by Non Standard Logics, is the only family of GUI building tools which offers the complete range of solutions, from an IDT to a UIMS to an Animator. They are all scalable, compatible, upgradable and easy to use. They're even fault tolerant!

A simple license key changes the functionality of the tool from an IDT, to an intermediate level UIMS, to an advanced UIMS, or to an Animator. With optional database connectivity. With optional Cross-Platform portability (XFaceMaker/Win.) With optional real-time widgets.

And because the tools all share the same user interface and architecture, you don't need to start from scratch. Your projects roll on. Your investment is protected. You meet your development schedule on budget...

"When looking at the needs of a large product, XFaceMaker stands proud."
(Advanced Systems)

Non Standard Logics (NSL) empowers software development organizations in developing and deploying better X/Motif and Windows Client/Server applications. With Non Standard Logics XFaceMaker family of GUI builders, for which QualSoft has exclusive North American distribution rights, and other software development and testing tools, QualSoft offers world class software products and services (including training, integration, customization and consulting) for organizations developing applications in UNIX, MS Windows and heterogeneous environments.

XFaceMaker: The Common Architecture

XFaceMaker Main Command Window

While XFaceMaker is a scalable family of GUI builders with increasing capabilities, all members share the following attributes:

The Dual Process Architecture is a unique design that provides automatic error recovery. Should programming errors cause your application under development to crash, this exclusive fault-tolerant architecture will not only keep XFaceMaker (XFM) up and running, it will also enable quick recovery to the point immediately preceding the design error. Or to a trusted state of your application, which it automatically stores at regular, user specified, intervals. This architecture also allows XFM to be extended dynamically with third party widgets and application functions without leaving the tool!

Groups let you structure your objects and all their resources. Groups can be cut, pasted and copied freely, providing you with a simple way of reusing portions of your designs or of enforcing short-term design sytles.

Templates let you pattern parts of your interface. The instances of a template will automatically inherit any subsequent change in the template. Templates support multiple inheritance and provide an excellent way of enforcing project, division or company-wide design styles and standards.

Projects let you divide your GUI tasks into subset files for better manageability while retaining the flexibility of treating the group of files as a single entity, for better control. XFM project suport is essential to coordinated, group development.

Ease of use: XFM provides one main window that acts as a hub for all you rdesign tasks and minimizes the number of windows a developer has to deal with, along with a graphics attachment editor for geometric form attachments and a powerful resource editor that allows fast editing of widget resources.

On-line, HTML documentation: convenient hypertext links facilitate the navigation through the developer's on-line documentation, using the supplied MOSAIC browser, or you rfavorite browser such as Netscape Navigator. The on-line documentation can also be printed in Postscript format.

Powerful, portable code generation: XFaceMaker generates standalone C or C++ code, resource, make and include files. Build anywhere - Deploy everywhere. With no runtime fees.

Compatibility eith industry standards: XFM reads and generates UIL code, offering a growth path from other GUI builders and supporting third party utilities such as UIL/Ada Converters.

Internationalization: XFaceMaker supports full internationalization of resources which are cataloged to generate consistent internationalized applications.

Convenient Text Editor: Wx, a flexible, multiple windows, full featured text editor, is included and integrated for editing complex resources and callbacks. And vi and Emacs editors are also integrated.

The XFaceMaker family of GUI builders runs natively on all popular UNIX platforms as well as on Windows NT systems running Hummingbird's eXceed PC X Server.

XFaceMaker can build native user interfaces for X/Motif, Microsoft Windows, Windows 95 and Windows NT.