CLIM

Rainer Joswig joswig@lavielle.com
Fri, 27 Mar 1998 20:51:06 +0100

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At 11:10 27.03.98 -0800, Mike McDonald wrote:

>>Since I know there are a lot of "old timer's" here, I thought I'd ask
>>a question. Was CLIM the whole windowing system protocol on genera?
>>I seem to remember some mention of Silica or something riding
>>underneath...

CLIM is not a windowing system. It is an UIMS (User Interface Management
System). It provides the programming interface for an
abstract windowing system.

The CLIM backend then will be attached to a particular window system
(Macintosh Common Lisp uses the Mac window system with their
special view classes).

CLIM 2 also allows a host specific look and feel. You are writing
your application and it will look according to the
host window (graphics) system (X, DW, Win, Mac, (Postscript), ...).

Silica is a special software layer inside of CLIM (developed by Xerox),
that enables you to have an abstract way to handle window regions,
their relationship, input and output in them, etc. This is an
important part for a portable UIMS.

CLIM does provide APIs for graphics, menus, commands, windows,
application frames, presentations, redrawing, high-level input/output,
formatted output, output recording, events, ...

CLIM does a lot for the user. Applications can get graphical user
interfaces often without changing the underlying code - thanks
to the concept of presentations.