Hi there ,
i am interesting in MOTIF programming.
One question :
Is it right that in Motif GUI programming the actions are automaticly transformed and networked to other clients over the internet without network programming necessary ?
Are the commands automatic transformed by the X11 system and protocoll ?
WBR Zabo
Yes, X11 is fundamentally a network protocol, including any toolkits you would use with X11. When client and server are on the same machine, the client connects to X11 with a UNIX domain socket for performance reasons, but it's still a socket. The deep details of how the connection is made is something you don't need to concern yourself with.
Mostly.
Plain X11-over-TCP is considered a bit old-fashioned these days. Kind of like telnet, it's been cut off by default as it lacks security features and is difficult to control. People usually wrap X11 connections with VNC instead if they want to connect to an X11 terminal over the internet. This also gives a moderate improvement in efficiency.
This still isn't a change to how your program works as much as what it connects to. I think the VNC connection would have to be made first, elsewhere.
Does that mean that i can program a application in MOTIF under Linux and the application can send data to the same
application over the internet on a different computer ?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that, but I don't think so. The socket connects application to video driver, not application to application. There's a little bit of IPC, like copy-paste between applications running inside the same X instance, but nothing that crosses server boundaries.
Two instances of one X-client running on two different computers, host1 and host2? The short answer is no. If both clients are running on the same server (i.e. the screen in front of you) there are probably tools to allow you to do this, but they are not built into Motif. You would have to investigate other tools/libraries.
If you were thinking of learning Motif programming to simplify inter-process communication, forget it. You are barking up the wrong tree. If, on the other hand, you want to learn GUI programming for Linux, don't bother. Motif is virtually dead with only legacy systems using it. Instead you should be looking at GTK and QT instead.
Andrew