New patch release available for Chiron 1.4

New patch release available for Chiron 1.4

["Kari A. Nies"]

       ANNOUNCING THE RELEASE OF CHIRON 1.4 (patch level 5)


The Arcadia project at the University of California, Irvine is pleased
to announce an updated release of the Chiron user interface development
system, version 1.4.

This is the first version of Chiron 1.4 to compile successfully
on the SunAda 2.1 compiler under Solaris 2.3.



           THE CHIRON USER INTERFACE DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM

The Chiron system provides tools for assisting in the development of
graphical user interfaces and provides a run-time system for managing
and supporting their dynamic behavior.

The objective of the Chiron system is to reduce long-term costs
associated with developing and maintaining graphical user interface
(GUI) software.  It achieves this objective by providing key interface
layers which are resilient to change.  In particular, Chiron strongly
separates an application from its user interface code, as well as
separating the user interface code from the underlying toolkit
substrates.  Chiron supports the construction of GUIs which provide
multiple coordinated views of application objects and allows flexible
restructuring of the configuration of those views.  Chiron supports a
concurrent model of control.  While the Chiron architecture supports
heterogeneous, multi-lingual systems, the development tools which are
part of this release only support clients (applications) written in Ada.

Chiron is a distributed system.  The Chiron server and clients run
in separate Unix processes.  Within a client, artists are active
interface agents that are bound to one or more objects. They encapsulate
decisions about how objects should be depicted (presentations) as
well as how they behave dynamically (dialogs).  Multiple artists can be
bound to a single object, providing coordinated multiple views of that
object.  A Chiron client is made up of application code, a set of
artists, and client support code.  The client support code implements
initialization, event detection and routing, and communication with the
server.  Client support code is automatically generated by client
building tools.

Chiron leverages from commercial GUI layout tools.  Specifically, Chiron
can be used with Sun Microsystem's DevGuide tool to create artists.
For those aspects of GUIs which DevGuide is incapable of supporting
(e.g. drawing on a canvas), DevGuide and Chiron tools can be used to
create an artist template into which the additional graphical aspects
can be added programmatically.

The Chiron server manages all aspects of the user interface that are
not artist or application specific.  It can be thought of as a virtual
machine providing a high-level graphical "toolkit" interface to artists
by means of an Abstract Depiction Hierarchy (ADH).  The server receives
ADH instructions from the artists and uses them to create and
manipulate an internal abstract representation of the graphical
interface. The representation is rendered to a concrete depiction (a
user viewable image) via calls to the underlying window system. The
server also listens for events from the window system (button push,
menu selection, etc) and translates them to Chiron events before
shipping them back to the appropriate client.  The Chiron server
provides flexibility in terms of windowing systems and toolkits,
application languages, and process inter-connection topology.  Although
we currently only provide support for Ada clients, it is feasible to
provide other language-specific interfaces to the server's ADH.

The Chiron model is highly concurrent.  Most components maintain
their own, and possibly multiple, threads of control.  Thus, unlike
most user interface architectures, Chiron avoids imposing sequential
control upon applications, allowing the application, the user interface,
and the server, to run in parallel.

Chiron has been described several places in the open literature.  The
best references are:

  "Separations of Concerns in the Chiron-1 User Interface Development
  and Management System." Richard N. Taylor and Gregory F. Johnson.
  Proceedings of InterChi'93 (ACM SIGCHI's CHI conference united with
  IFIP TC 13's Interact conference), pp. 367--384.  Amsterdam, April 1993.

  "Chiron-1: A Software Architecture for User Interface Development,
  Maintenance, and Run-time Support", by Richard N. Taylor, Kari A. Nies,
  Gregory Alan Bolcer, Craig A.  MacFarlane, Gregory F. Johnson, and
  Kenneth M. Anderson, to appear in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human
  Interaction.  (A version of this paper is available as a UCI
  techreport TR-94-12)

  (both papers are available via ftp and from the Chiron home
   page on the WWW, http://www.ics.uci.edu/Arcadia/Chiron/chiron.html).





                       SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Chiron 1.4 requires SunAda version 1.1, the X Window System, version 11
revision level 5, on a Sun 4 color or monochrome workstation. Chiron has
been developed using the gcc compiler v2.5.8. The latest patch release
has been successfully compiled under SunAda 2.1 running on Solaris 2.3.
This version has also been successfully ported to an RS6000 under Verdix
VADS 6.2.

Chiron makes use of XView version 3.0 and Motif version 1.2 to build
the XView and Motif versions of the Chiron server.  You will need at least
one of these toolkits.

Chiron also requires Q v3.2, an Ada-C interprocess communication support
utility and Arpc v402.3, an extension to Sun RPC/XDR 4.0, both developed
by the Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder.
You must install Arpc and Q before installing Chiron.  For convenience,
copies of both Arpc and Q have been bundled in the Chiron 1.4 distribution.

Space requirements (for Chiron 1.4 only, excludes Q and Arpc),
including both the XView and the Motif versions of the
Chiron server and all support tools:

     Distribution size : ~9 Meg (~7 Meg w/o applications)
     Build size        : ~125 Meg (~87 Meg w/o applications)
     Installation size : ~75 Meg (~62 Meg w/o applications)

Distribution size = size of sources, uninstalled.
Build size = fully installed after build
Installation size = unnecessary ada libs removed, object files removed.

Motif Chiron server size :  ~7 Meg  (2.7 Meg = X11, Xt, Xm)
XView Chiron server size :  ~10 Meg (3.1 Meg = X11, XView, olgx)
Trivial Chiron client    :  ~900 K



                        FTP INSTRUCTIONS

How to obtain Chiron 1.4  via anonymous FTP

1.  FTP to the machine liege.ics.uci.edu (internet address 128.195.1.5)

2.  When asked for a username use 'anonymous'

3.  When asked for a password use your email address
    (e.g. pat@cs.university.edu)

4.  Change directory (cd) into the pub/arcadia/chiron directory.

5.  Set a file transfer mode that will allow you to transfer binary
    files.  One way to do this that usually works is to issue the
    command 'binary'

6.  Type the command 'get RELEASE_chiron.1.4.p5.tar.Z' (Binaries are
    available in RELEASE_chiron.1.4.p5-bin.tar.Z)

7.  Quit FTP.

8.  You now have a compressed tar file containing the source for Chiron.

9.  You need to uncompress the file by typing
    'uncompress RELEASE_chiron.1.4.p5.tar.Z'

10. Now untar the file to create the source and documentation tree by
    typing 'tar xvf RELEASE_chiron.1.4.p5.tar' at the Unix prompt.

11. Read the INSTALLATION.notes file in the RELEASE directory
    to find out how to install the system.  Be sure that you place
    Chiron in its final location before installation as it is difficult
    to move once installed.



If you already have patch level 4 installed, you can obtain a patch
to bring your system up to patch level 5.  The patch is available via
ftp, located at:

         pub/arcadia/chiron/patches/chiron.1.4.patch.5.tar.Z





		     ALSO AVAILABLE ON THE WEB


See the Chiron home page at

	   http://www.ics.uci.edu/Arcadia/Chiron/chiron.html

for software releases, patches, papers and screenshots of running
Chiron applications.





SUMMARY OF CHANGES BETWEEN CHIRON 1.4 PATCH LEVELS 4 AND 5:

1.  Modified sources to make this version compatible with both
    SunAda 1.1 and SunAda 2.1 compilers.  This is the first version of
    Chiron 1.4 that is compatible with SunAda 2.1 running under Solaris 2.3.
    This version has also been ported to an RS6000 under Verdix 6.2.
2.  New version of the flight simulator application with more artists
    and better graphics.
3.  New sorting application.
4.  Fixed numerous memory leaks in both the client and the server.
5.  Got rid of machine code in translated artists.  This has been
    a major hindrance for portability.
6.  Added lcc targets for all application Makefiles to force
    lcc translation on artists.
7.  Added methods set_line_thickness and set_line_style for class
    ADL_spline under the Motif server.
8.  Cleaned up artist shutdown.  Added Shutdown_Client procedure
    to artist manager package that allows an artist to programmatically
    shutdown an entire client (useful for quit buttons).  Shutdown_All
    was changed to Shutdown_All_Artists for clarity.
9.  Got rid of bogus Q error messages at startup.
10. Fixed bug in ADL_polyline::destroy that was causing the
    server to crash sporadically.
11. Added "name" parameters to all classes derived from ADL_panel_item.
    Allows fonts to be specified as .Xdefaults instead of hardcoding
    them into Chiron applications.  e.g.,

        <.Xdefaults file>
        *QuitButton.fontList:           lucidasans-12

        <artist code>
         quit_button := ~Apply(ADL_button,
                                create,
                                parent => button_panel,
                                button_id => 1,
                                label => "Quit",
                                name => "QuitButton",
                                auto_placement => true);