Dear Ralf:

Thanks much for your comments.

We do understand that Composer needs to be updated.  At the current time we
are working on merging our PC and UNIX development environment into a next
generation joint windowing development available under UNIX and under
Windows; as yet we are still investigating what it will take to achieve
this on all UNIX platforms due to technical issues surrounding threading
(we think we have a way, but as always in software, you never know till you
get through all the issues).

However, under Windows, we hope that the merged environment will be showing
up in our next major release, sometime early next year.

Our new development environment is inspired by Visual Basic, Visual C++ and
Borland Delphi.  We want to make Lisp popular and we want to make it
conmfortable for new users, who we assume will be familiar with another
Windows-style language development environment. This development
environment is not based on CLIM, but instead is based on Common Graphics,
which one might describe as a CLOS wrapping of the Windows GUI API.

Please note that CLIM will continue to be supported.

Regards,

Jim Veitch
VP Engineering.

At 02:41 PM 9/21/97 +0200, Ralf Moeller wrote:
>In my previous mail I wrote
>
>>In order to start the window-based development environment, type
>>(wt::start-composer) into the Listener (or try the menu named "Composer").
>>If this results in an error, ...
>
>PS: I forgot to mention that the Composer menues (see the Emacs menubar)
>are enabled after the Composer has been started successfully. Also try
>typing
>:winspect <expression> into the Listener buffer. Or type :wdebug as a
>command into the Listener buffer after an error has occurred and see what
>happens.
>IMHO the Composer development environment urgently needs renovation! It's
>not state of the art any more.
>
>Franz developers, please listen: [sprVERY-URGENT]: For Unix, WE NEED A CLIM
>DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT (preferrably with source code).
>
>Maybe, the files I collected from various sources are a good starting point:
>http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/clim-environment/
>
>As an addition to an environment for Common Lisp, the CLIM implementation
>of a specific vendor should provide a development environment for CLIM
>itself. It would be nice to have graphical representations of e.g. command
>tables, a tree-like visualization of the pane structure of an application
>frame, a presentation inspector (see the Genera docs :-). Ever searched an
>error about why a certain translator is not active? Inspecting the
>internals of the implementation of CLIM with the Composer is far too
>complicated and no fun anyway. My students always complain about the
>"opaqueness" of CLIM. CLIM is great, the development environment for CLIM
>is poor (or not existing). I could convince our department to invest in a
>CLIM development environment $-)
>
>Kind regards,
>
>--Ralf
>
>
>
>
>---------------
>
>Http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/
>
>
>
>