ET++: A Portable Application Framework

ET++ is a portable application framework, used to make platform-independent GUI-based application programs. I (Greg Ferrar) will be studying ET++ this semester (Spring 1997) in CS 497REJ under the direction of Dr. Ralph Johnson, at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

My Documentation

I'm documenting several aspects of ET++:

A Partial ET++ Inheritance Hierarchy
Runtime Structure of an ET++ Application
Event Handling
Invalidation/Redraw
Graphical Layout Management
Graphics Contexts (Ports), an example of the Pen/Paper/Ink pattern as used in ET++
iconedit: A Simple ET++ Application

Patterns

We have identified a recurring pattern in graphical user interfaces which I have documented below:

Invalidation/Redraw Pattern

Other Resources

I've mirrored the entire source code directory for ET++ locally, for your browsing pleasure. Note that this is only the core source code, and does not include documentation, sample applications, etc., which are available from the ftp site mentioned below.

There is a directory chock full of useful ET++ information, including several papers and the source code, at this ftp site.

There's another ftp site for ET++ here; there's lots of overlap between this and the previous, but the first one is the one that Erich Gamma (one of the creators of ET++) sent me, so it's probably the better choice. Plus, the first one has many of the documents in both PDF and Postscript format, whereas the second has them only in Postscript.

ET++ has also been extended into MET++, which adds support for multimedia (mainly sound and 3-D images).

Then there's

Again, there is overlap with the above resources.

Please send me any additional resources you know about.

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