Hi,
I've just finished this book, after reading it for a couple of weeks (it's 560-odd pages long). It's a very impressive book, full of ideas for better debugging and improving the performance of Motif applications, most of which are directly applicable to our own application development. I'm convinced that using the techniques in this book could substantially improve the quality of our user interface software.
The first half of the book is about debugging, and concentrates mostly on the use of software tools available as part of the X distribution or as ‘contrib’ X software. These tools (e.g. ‘editres’) look very useful. Unfortunately, HP has removed all these debugging tools from the X distribution it ships. We should be able to get them from their semi- independent user group's FTP server, but it's a bit of a pain.
The second half of the book deals with performance improvements, both real and ‘sleight of hand’ (tricks). The tricks for making application startup times appear shorter seem especially relevant in TMS-OS, where our applications take dreadfully long to appear. Unfortunately again, the Core Interface application framework's architecture blocks the use of most of these fixes, though with a little thought I think we could make big strides forward.
Anyway, overall a very interesting book, and one which could contribute significantly to the quality and performance of TMS-OS applications. If you want to make the step from being a merely competent X/Motif programmer to being an expert, reading this book will help a lot.
David
David Price, TMS-OS