Motif Widget Writer's Guide Migration Version

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.