Institute of Computer Science III
University of Bonn
Databases * Information Systems * Software Engineering * Pattern Recognition * Image Processing * Artificial Intelligence * Robotics


Penguin - A Portable Environment for a Graphical User Interface

Dieter W. Fellner and Martin Fischer

Although designers of user interfaces can choose between several different user interface management systems like InterViews [LVC89, LCI*92], fresco [X C94], motif [Ber91], Tcl/Tk [Wel95], or ET++ [Wei92], none of these systems is portable between different operating systems. Most of them are fixed to the X Window system [SG86, O'R90]. All of them provide a large number of dialog objects, i.e.\ a large number of object classes like buttons or sliders. The complexity of the interface is further increased by the diversity of the individual objects (push-buttons, check-buttons, \ldots). As a consequence, the training period for programers becomes unacceptably long. In this situation we felt the need for a portable graphical user interface that is fast to learn and easy to use still providing an adequate functionality. This report documents the application programmer's interface to PENGUIN.

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