forms library

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Article 10673 of comp.sys.sgi:
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From: markov at cs.ruu.nl (Mark Overmars)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: FORMS Library..?
Message-ID: <1992Aug10.195640.191 at cs.ruu.nl>
Date: 10 Aug 92 19:56:40 GMT
References: <HARI.92Jul28194749 at robios5.me.wisc.edu>
Sender: network-news at cs.ruu.nl
Distribution: comp.sys.sgi
Organization: Utrecht University, Dept. of Computer Science
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Here is a bit more extended information on how to get the FORMS library.
Concerning the questions on how standard or popular it is the following.
It is not standard in the sense that it is not X. It is fully GL-based. It
runs on all SGI machines. There is a port to the RS6000 on the way but there
are some problems here (mainly because the RS6000 does not have the font
manager). It seem possible to run FORMS under VOGLE but I have never seen this
and I don't know how easy this is. If your applications should run on many
different platforms don't use FORMS but go the Motif. But if you stick to SGI
machines I think you might be very happy with FORMS (many people are). It is
(from what I hear from other people and what I see from my own students)
extremely easy to use and in general powerful enough for what you want. It
comes with full doc and many demo programs.

Concerning popularity, it is hard for me to judge but from the mail messages I
get I estimate that it is use at  couple of hunderds of sites and by over a
thousand people.

To save the best for last. It is free!

--------------------------------------------------

The Forms Library is a package for building Graphical User Interfaces (GUI's)
is a simple way. The package is very powerful and can easily be extended. It
is fully written using GL andi, hence, uses the nice looking graphics
provided. It runs on all SGI platforms with IRIX 3.3 or higher. Preferably
though use IRIX 4.0 or higher.

The current version of the library is 2.0.

To get the Forms Library by ftp use anonymous ftp to

	Address:	archive.cs.ruu.nl
	Login:		"anonymous" or "ftp"
	Password:	your email address (you at your_domain)
	Usage:		see the ftp(1) manual on your system

The Forms Library and related things can be found in the directory
SGI/FORMS.

If you cannot use ftp, we're also running a mail server. To get the
Forms library by mail send  mail to

	mail-server at cs.ruu.nl

or the old-fashioned path alternative

	...!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!ruuinf!mail-server

In your mail place the following lines:

	send SGI/FORMS/forms2.0.tar.Z
        end

You will get the library uuencoded by mail. 
	

Mark Overmars