User interfaces are still all the rage, and Symbolics Inc, Burlington, Massachusetts has teamed up with Lucid Inc to create one for Lisp systems. The two companies have committed to support the Common Lisp Interface Manager, which Symbolics describes as a powerful, high-level, object-oriented user interface management system. The system is designed to address the two main bottlenecks in applications development: the difficulty of creating window-based applications with current low-level window systems; and the difficulty of making the applications portable across operating systems and hardware. The Lisp Interface Manager is a layer on top of a window system that takes on the host system’s look and feel, such as Open Look and Motif, the interfaces promoted by the rival Unix camps, Unix International Inc and the Open Software Foundation. The Common Lisp Interface Manager takes advantage of the the existing investment in low-level window system standards such as the X Window System but goes beyond it to provide a complete set of tools for writing complex window-based applications. To promote standardisation, and to ensure portability, the two are negotiating with International Lisp Associates Inc to have that company provide implementations to interested Lisp vendors. International Lisp will co-ordinate the development of the Common Lisp Interface Manager specification, which will be submitted to the ANSI Common Lisp Committee when complete. As well as the three named companies, Xerox Corp’s Palo Alto Research Center was involved in the specification – in particular developing fundamental new insight into the design of architectures that provide flexible and efficient support of a wide range of user interface functionality. The Common Lisp Interface Manager incorporates design concepts from Silica, Xerox PARC’s Lisp-based window system kernel, which features a novel use of object orientation to manipulate the fundamental concepts in the window system kernel explicitly. Xerox claims that this meta level architecture makes it possible to provide applications portability without dictating look and feel or compromising functionality or performance. Silica’s meta level architecture is described as similar to the metaobject protocol developed by Xerox PARC for the Common Lisp Object System. Symbolics believes that with the standardisation on Common Lisp, standardisation of the object system and now tackling the user interface management system, the three barriers to applications portability are being overcome. Pricing and availability for the Common Lisp Interface Manager are to be announced at a later date.
