OPEN LOOK Versus Motif Toolkit Architecture

OLIT and Motif have very similar architectures whereas XView and Motif do not. When migrating from XView to Motif, you should note these toolkit differences.

The XView toolkit implements both the user interface objects, called packages, and the routines and processes that hold the interface together (creation routines, event processing, and so on), while Motif and OLIT implement basically just the user interface object, widgets, leaving the routines and processes to the Intrinsics library. For example, xv_init() is a function that is in the XView library. The corresponding function to use for OLIT or Motif programming, XtAppInitialize(), is in the Xt Intrinsics library.

The three toolkits represent two different GUIs. The appearance of the XView and OLIT toolkits are similar, whereas the appearance of Solaris Motif is noticeably different. Although there is a rough one-to-one correspondence between the function calls in the libraries, the behavior of parallel programs is different. That is, even after an OLIT (or XView) program has been converted to use the Solaris Motif library, it still to some degree has an OPEN LOOK appearance. A program in such a state does not adhere to either style completely.