Changes for W3Kit 2.0

Complete Overhaul of Configuration Management

W3Kit now uses a completely different and much more flexible configuration scheme, which acts as an extension of the CGI environment. A shell script wrapper is used to set the W3Kit configuration variables for the main application executable. The W3Document class and the W3Kit template application have been completely overhauled as a result.

NOTE: Because this new scheme is not source-code compatible with W3Kit 1.0, a conversion script (makefiles/Upgrade-2.0.sh) has been provided which automates most of the required changes.

More Portability

W3Kit and Geomview are now more portable than ever. W3Kit applications have been built and tested on:

• SunOS 4.1.x (modulo DPS-capable X server)
• Solaris 2.3
• SGI Irix 4.0.x
• NeXTSTEP 3.1

Major Documentation Upgrade

The documentation now contains a complete reference guide to the W3Kit classes. This guide will remain accurate and up-to-date since it can be generated automatically from the header files (via make documentation).

The overview sections have been significantly revised, and a short crash course in Objective-C has been added.

Enhanced Support for 2D Graphics

The W3PostScript class has been enhanced in a number of ways:

• A lockFocus method has been added so that DPS operations can be performed outside of drawPostScript. For example, DPS operations can be used for sophisticated hit detection in servicing a mouseClick:.
• Applications can now easily return out-of-line PS images to the user, not only GIF images as before. This is the purpose of the new postScriptDocument method, which returns a PS image document suitable for out-of-line return via W3Application's terminateWithDocument method.
• A clearPostScript method has been added for convenience to perform common PS graphics state initialization (clearing the background to white, etc).

In addition, some C functions have been added for convenient manipulation of DPS user paths (see <W3Kit/w3graphics.h>).

Better HTML Compliance

When running under a CGI/1.1 server, W3Kit can now determine which client invoked it and thereby try to work around some of the incompatibilities between clients and the HTML standards they support.

For example, versions of X Mosaic prior to 2.2 do not support "hidden" fields, and so W3Kit will cache state without using hidden fields when talking to versions 2.0 and 2.1 of X Mosaic. Also, for clients other than Mosaic, W3Kit will use the HTML+ syntax rather than the HTML 1.8 syntax for graphical inputs.

Other minor adjustments have been made for better compliance with the developing HTML 2.0 DTD and HTML 3.0 DTD. Please let me know if W3Kit generates anything contrary to these specifications.

The Geometry Center Home Page

Author: Paul Burchard
Comments to: webmaster@www.geom.uiuc.edu
Created: Apr 18 1994 --- Last modified: Tue Jun 18 10:36:28 1996