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Motif 2.1 Widget Writer's Guide
Strategies
There are three ways to make your new widget accessible to
UIL programmers:
You can provide your UIL customers with two small header files and one MRM
initialization file. These files will contain sufficient information for the
UIL compiler to compile your customer's UIL programs. Of the three ways,
this is the easiest to implement. However, this way has some liabilities when
it comes to type checking. That is, the UIL compiler will not detect certain
coding problems in your customers' UIL programs.
You can provide your customers with a Widget Meta-Language Database (WMD)
file. The UIL compiler reads the WMD file at runtime and processes the new or
modified widget definitions dynamically. This is somewhat harder than the
previous solution; however, an updated WMD file will allow UIL to do type
checking.
You can provide your customers with a new UIL compiler that understands
your new widget(s) This solution is the hardest of the three ways to
implement. Furthermore, it provides no real advantages in performance over the
second solution. Therefore, we do not recommend doing this. See the Motif
Release Notes for information on building a UIL compiler.
Even if you choose the second or third mechanism, you still have to provide
your customers with most of the files described in the first mechanism. For
example, if you provide your customers with a WMD file, you must also provide
them with one of the header files and an MRM initialization file.
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