ViewKit
More info
- Creator
- Silicon Graphics
- Type
- C++ framework on top of Motif
- License
- Proprietary
SGI's C++ framework on top of Motif, which let IRIX applications be built from components with their own windows, dialogs and callbacks rather than hand-wired Xt calls.
Motif is a C library, and the programs looked like it: long runs of XtVaCreateManagedWidget, callbacks as global functions, state in static variables. Silicon Graphics created IRIS ViewKit in the early 1990s for its own IRIX applications and shipped it with the developer tools. The central idea was the component: a C++ class that owns a subtree of widgets, with VkComponent as the base and VkApp, VkSimpleWindow and VkDialogManager for the application, its windows and its dialogs. Callbacks were routed to member functions through a small macro, so an object could listen to its own buttons.
Much of what gave Indigo Magic its consistent feel, help menus, preference dialogs and windows that knew how to close themselves, was ViewKit default behaviour. Integrated Computer Solutions licensed the library and sold it for Solaris, HP-UX and Linux, so it lived on into the 2000s outside SGI as well. When Motif lost ground to Qt and GTK, ViewKit went down with it, but the notion of a widget tree as objects with their own lifecycle is exactly what Qt went on to build everything on.