Paris, France-based Ilog SA will announce a graphical user interface designer later this month, to add to its collection of C++ development tools. Views 2.0, which had a sneak preview at Unix Expo, in New York, is the first C++ class library that tightly integrates graphical user interface-building tools with structured graphics, according to Patrick Suel, the company’s director of marketing in the US. It offers all the basic components plus the structured graphics and completely merges the graphics and graphical user interface components, he said. The source code produced with the package will be royalty-free, says Suel, so there will be no extra for developers. The package will produce code that runs across all the major Unix systems that support X Window as well as Windows, Windows NT and OS/2 Presentation Manager. Despite the company’s prominent position in the object-technology market, Suel says he is very cool about the moves towards standardisation. We are in the ‘un-CORBA’ company. CORBA adds too much real-estate. When you sell to developers you have to sell your products and then to try and sell them CORBA is like trying to sell them another language, he said, but added that despite the momentum behind CORBA, Ilog is going to wait until the final specifications arrive.
