Over 40 sample clients for XIElib are now available for you to learn from
and modify! These are the same samples included on the CD supplied with my
XIElib programming book, but with bug fixes applied.
The current release was made August 16, 1998. A number of crash bugs
detected when porting to RedHat 5.1 Linux are fixed in this release. In
addition, changes were made to the photoflo backend code (lib/backend.c) to
support 16bpp TrueColor and StaticColor visuals.
As features are added and additional bugs are found and fixed, I will make
them available here. So check back here every few months for updates.
If you are running XFree86 (on Linux, for example) and xdpyinfo does not
report XIE as an extension, or my clients, when run, report "XIE not
found!" or similar, then you probably need to tell XFree86 to load XIE, which
in XFree86 is an external module. Click
here
to learn how to do this.
README
08-16-98.tar.gz
images.tar.gz
For information on Prentice Hall's book about XIElib programming, click here.
Or, visit Amazon books now and order online by clicking
here.
Note, the listing of Amazon Books here does not imply an endorsement by me
or Prentice Hall. I just put this link here as a convenience.
Click
here to read the preface.
Click
here to view the errata sheet for the first edition.
Last updated May, 1998.
A consise review of the book was published in the Usenix publication ;login: in June, 1998. Click
here
to read it (requires password).
The following are magazine articles I've written which discuss XIE or XIElib programming.
Sample source code for the Linux Journal article is included with my other XIElib sample source code in the directory xiesamples/emp.
http://www.sigs.com
http://www.unixreview.com
http://www.ssc.com/lj
Using a drag-and-drop
user interface, the user can construct photoflos by dragging import, process,
and export elements from a palette and dropping them onto the canvas.
Connections between elements are easily made by
clicking the mouse on the elements to be connected and then selecting a menu item. Technique parameters can
be specified by selecting an element and bringing up a dialog that prompts
for the relevant data. Elements can be moved around on the
canvas using the mouse in order to make the photoflo drawing more viewable.
XIEGen is useful for analyzing photoflos for adherence to the XIE protocol
specification, and it provides clear diagnostic output to help the user
understand what was found to be wrong during the analysis.
Once you have designed a "clean" photoflo, XIEGen can be used to execute
the photoflo and see the results immediately. This makes XIEGen a powerful
photoflo prototyping tool.
The output of XIEGen is a text
file that contains a description of the architecture and its attributes, written
in a simple
language that was specifically designed for XIEGen. XIEGen is capable of
reading a file that adheres to the grammar of this language, prepared by the user in an editor such as vi or emacs, and displaying it
graphically or executing the photoflo that it represents.
XIEGen is currently in development. I hope to release it as free software for
the Linux community sometime in 2000. At the moment, I am distracted by another
book project...
Contact me by e-mail if you have questions
regarding XIEGen.