🚀 go-pugleaf

|> One thing that would be useful for Linux would be a RAD (Rapid

There's a list of such tools in the comp.windows.x FAQ at
ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/faqs. It includes pointers to other tools such as WCL
and WINTERP. There's also probably a list in the comp.windows.x.motif FAQ.

|> A few years ago a book was published called "Motif Tools" (IIRC
|> it was published by O'Reilly). This was one of the best window-

This is David Flanagan's "Motif Tools: Streamlined GUI Design and Programming
with the Xmt Library" (ISBN 1-56592-044-9). It is excellent.

|> has written, so if the UI is changed, the programmer's code gets
|> overwritten. Sometimes the tool attempts to get round this problem
|> in a clumsy way with comments, eg:

Tools that do this properly re-read the changes and then export them 
unchanged.

|> IMO this is, at best, ugly. The idea behind putting the UI code
|> and the functionality code in separate classes is to remove this
|> problem.

True, but you'd really have to come up with a reasonable way to have the
classes interact in order to make this effective.

|> C++/Qt, C++/GTK--, C/Motif, Java/awt, Python/tkinter, etc. Indeed,
|> backends could be written that target other platforms, such as

Having different back-ends works only if they have enough in common so that
the "front-end" (i.e. the part that the user manipulates) makes sense.  That
is, it doesn't do much good to output Java/AWT code unless the objects that
are being manipulated resemble the AWT objects. I don't think you want to
limit yourself to some universal interface and then have to deal with the
least common denominator; if the RAD tool is actually good at building
interfaces, then it should be used to deal with the hard details of a
particular toolkit.

|> Does anything like this currently exist for Linux?

There are several tools available for Linux. One tool that has been demo'ed
on Linux but is not (yet?) being produced for it is the ICS Builder Xcessory,
which can produce C, C++, C++/ViewKit, Ada, Java/AWT (1.1), and C/UIL code.

-- 
David B. Lewis      Editor, The Motif Developer: http://www.motifzone.com/tmd/
dbl@motifzone.com   WebWrangler, The Motif Zone: http://www.motifzone.com/