widgets)?
[Last modified: May 99]

Answer: Ken Sall (ksall@cen.com) writes:

If you have Motif 2.0 or later, see the new document provided by OSF called
"OSF/Motif Widget Writer's Guide" in the directory:
doc/widgetGuide/Output/draft/ps.

If you have Motif 1.*, try these references (details in the BOOKS topic):

Paul Asente, Donna Converse, and Ralph Swick, X Window System Toolkit,
Second Edition, 1998.

Nye, Adrian & O'Reilly, Tim,
X Toolkit Intrinsics Programming Manual.Motif Edition, Volume 4M

Flanagan, David, Editor,
X Toolkit Intrinsics Reference Manual, Volume 5


joe shelby (jshelby@autometric.com) writes:

Alastair Gourlay, a former member of the Motif Development group at OSF, has
written 2 articles for _The X Resource_, published by O'Reilly and Associates.

The first, "Writing Motif Widgets : A Pragmatic Approach" can be found in
Issue 6.  It covers writing a XmPrimitive-derived widget, deriving from that
widget, and writing a XmManager-derived widget.  Also included are brief
summaries of several _Xm private functions for widget writers, how to use the
Motif 1.2 Representation Type functions, and adding the widgets to Mrm/Uil.

The second, "The One-Minute Manager : Custom Motif Layout Widgets Made Easy"
can be found in Issue 10.  It expands and greatly simplifies creating
composite widgets for Motif.  Gourlay has created and released a new widget,
the XmpGeometry widget that handles all of the geometry management issues for
you and provides convenience functions for determiningparent and child
widgets' perfered sizes.  All the programmer has to do to derive from this
widget is create the new resources and constraints and implement 2 new class
methods to override the XmpGeometry's methods.  Included with the XmpGeometry
class are 3 example derived widgets.

Donald L. McMinds and Joseph P. Whitty have written a book, _Writing Your Own
OSF/Motif Widgets_, published by Prentice Hall for Hewlett-Packard
Professional Books.  Both authors work at HP's Workstation Systems Division,
and have been involved with Motif developement since its beginnings.  The book
(which is mostly code with explanations) gives details on writing
XmPrimitive-derived, XmManager-derived, and XmGadget-derived widgets, with one
example widget for each.  In addition, the book provides "man-pages" for
several _Xm private functions for programmer convenience.