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Xtreme - About XtremeMotivationXtreme was born from the idea of value-adding the programmers introductionary C++ course of the Institute for Applied Mathematics IAM at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. I was one of the instructors during 1995-1998. Back in 1997, we finally got rid of those ancient DOS boxes and settled for two four-processor HP workstations, with 20" Linux terminals. Unfortunately, without the simple but straightforward BGI, the course was entirely text-based. Two colleagues and myself got together and discussed what an alternative graphics library should look like. Xlib makes it damn hard to maintain ones sanity. Motif wasn't available for home use (and not very healthy either). Opening a window had to be as easy as opening a file... If under Unix everything is a file, then why not a window, too. Xtreme treats windows like files. You open them, multiple at a time; you write out stuff to them; you read input from them; you close them. We chose a C++-like stream interface.Suitable for...You can program basic visualization tools with Xtreme pretty quickly. This is usually vector/line-oriented graphics, with comparatively few interactivity. This is easy to do, and Xtreme is sufficiently fast for this kind of tasks.Unsuitable for...Due to the way Xtreme works -- it manages all the redrawing for you -- it is not suitable for heavily pixel-based applications. I found it also pretty inconvenient to develop applications with much interactivity, like menus, buttons, and such. For these purposes, it's better to learn an event-oriented toolkit such as Qt.ScreenshotsAuthors & CreditsXtreme was designed, implemented and ported by Patrick Schemitz. The stream concept was developed by Sebastian Ritterbusch, Philipp Schäfer and Patrick Schemitz. Xtreme got usable thanks to the immense help -- testing, debugging, requests for missing features -- of Martin Häfner and Dirk Stüker. Thanks, guys! |
| Last modified: Thu Aug 24 22:19:55 CEST 2000 | Patrick Schemitz |
