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ArticlesTourist or Native?


February 1996 / Letters / Tourist or Native?

Although BYTE consistently demonstrates high editorial standards, we noted with concern that your Special Report "And One for All" (November) contained inaccurate statements about our product, XVT. In particular, author David Linthicum told readers our product was not native and that its functionality reflected only the small set of capabilities common to all the GUIs supported. As our product is a thin-layered API that calls the native windowing system, this statement is incorrect.

When the article says XVT does not contain such features as MDI and geometry management, it is clearly incorrect again. Our products contain both these features, as well as many other features not common to all supported platforms, including por table help, printing, data structures, MVC implementation, font selection, and a set of common dialog b oxes, to name a few.

Dave Locke
Director of Marketing, XVT Software
davel@xvt.com

I did not intend to attack XVT or other portable tools but to enlighten developers on the trade-offs involved when building portable applications. The article did not state that XVT was "not native," only that lowest-common-denominator (LCD) portable tools are not able to support all native features to remain portable.

For instance, page 2-1 of the "XVT Platform-Specific Book for MS Windows" states: "If ... you need to provide some native-platform GUI functionality not available in the XVT Portability Toolkit, then the ... code that provides that functionality will be non-portable." MDI does not appear in the "XVT Portability Toolkit Reference" index but is listed in Appendix A: "Non-Portable Attributes, Escape Codes, and Functions" of the "XVT Platform-Specific Book for MS Windows." The fact is, you can't be all things to all platforms and stil l provide portability.

While I discussed LCD from a conceptual standpoint, using XVT as an example, I also stated that "most tools fall somewhere between the LCD and emulation approaches." That includes XVT. -- David Linthicum


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