ICL Plc has started previewing graphics technology that it has been working on with Fujitsu’s artificial intelligence department since 1988. ICL Xg is an object-oriented graphics tool kit for the X Window System which has resulted from a collaboration between Fujitsu and ICL’s Dublin-based software development centre: it was shown both at the recent Unix Fair in Tokyo earlier this month (CI No 1,820), and last week to a party of journalists visiting the Dublin centre. The tool kit, which ICL will show at UniForum and officially introduce in March 1992, will be pushed as a standard tool kit for commercial developers producing graphical user interfaces under X, still a highly complex task. While tool kits exist for dialogue interfaces such as Open Look and Motif, few tool kits exist for the production of graphical data (exceptions include Digital Equipment Corp’s GoBE, InterViews from Stanford University and DataViews from VI Corp), the alternative being to use raw Xlib. The Xg toolkit includes interfaces to linked C and C++ libraries and a distributed server. A set of objects includes the traditional lines, circle and bit maps, but extends them to higher-level, specialised objects such as trees, graphs, tables and networks. For instance, container objects can include any number of other graphics objects contained within them; there arealso bar graph objects (using pseudo three dimensional display – full three-dimensional working is on the way), line graph object, animation objects (a series of bit-maps run in sequence) and table objects for charts. Objects can be directly manipulated via mouse, including selection, dragging, resizing and rescaling. ICL has already used early versions of the software at customers such as Cathay Pacific Ltd in Hong Kong, and the National Westminster Bank Plc, both ICL DecisionPower users. Cost in the UK will be UKP2,000 per user for a development system and UKP20 per user run-time. It will run on ICL’s Sparc and Intel iAPX-86 systems running Unix System V.4, and on Sun Microsystems Inc workstations.
