This question will require an HP employee to answer..

[webmasterpdx]

There are frequently requests for functionality that doesn't currently exist on the prime. One fairly easy way that HP could provide us with a way to help ourselves would be to allow us to generate events ourselves and put them in the event stack programmatically. I've done this in other GUI's in the past (like the QNX GUI, Photon).
The idea is, let's say, I want to execute the check command on a program, I could issue the shift-program key event and the select the program I want event, and finally the click on the location of the CHECK button event, effectively doing the same thing.
Is there currently a way to do this? If not, I'm suggesting that you guys add this in a future release, as we could help ourselves by creating our own functionality by emulating manual behavior on the keyboard/mouse.
Thx
-Donald

[Tim Wessman]

There are a lot of impediments to fully support or allow this at the moment. We are heading that direction, but there is a lot of code that needs rewriting in order to get there and frankly giving the ability to override anything in the system is not high on the priority list as there are many more important things to do above it.

Remember, a large chunk of this code originated with a very memory constrained system where we were concerned about counting bytes of memory. The 39gII has about 240kb of RAM when booted and all the UI had to fit in there. A good example of that is the catalog. Previously before I recently changed that, the whole command catalog could fit into about 1KB for the data structure when running. Now that I've added more dynamic functions in there to include user commands, cas functions, program functions, app functions, etc the base memory requirement went up to about 8KB. Not much for prime, but definitely would have been problematic on the older system.


You also keep talking about "widgets". There are no "widgets" as you think of them in Prime. Rather, each screen type is written specifically for its purpose. A big reason for that was the memory use required to go that route once you included all the vtables and extra overhead. Again, we are heading in that direction to correct things, but it isn't a high priority at the moment.

[webmasterpdx]

I'm writing my own widgets.....it's just graphics drawing and capturing events.