Motif,OS/2,Windows Form-Based Type Apps <-> GTK+/Gnome

[Larry Morley <lmorley albany net>]

Hi,

I have a whole slew of apps that are currently written in Motif which
run under CDE; some even started life as OS/2 or Windows apps a very,
very long time ago.  As Motif apps, the "fields", "labels", etc. are
at x and y offsets on a xmBulletinBoardWidgetClass widget.  I've begun
converting most of them to GTK+ for under Gnome.  Here's the problems
I'm encountering:

The placement of most of the "widgets" and "gadgets" are at fixed
X and Y coordinates.  When they were originally written, relative
positioning wasn't really an option.  Most of them are layed out like
a form, so converting them isn't too horrible, but it is rather time
consuming.  Is there a "window editor" that allows one to place
widgets and gadgets at fixed positions and generates code that keeps
them there?  This would make my life a lot simpler...  Motif & UIDL
seemed like a decent choice for a while, and all these apps work
with LessTif, but I haven't been able to find a free UIDL compiler.
By "form" I mean that the main window consists primarily of fields
a user fills out, hits enter, and starts a process running (maybe
not the most advanced user interface going, but it's worked so
far, and I haven't had any gripes about the apps being hard to use).

Problem two is that, since they are forms, they almost exclusively
have fixed widths and heights (or at least max widths and heights).
How do you support this for a main window with GTK (that is, a
window being either an icon or a fixed-size form)?

I'd like to get these all using one toolkit for obvious reasons.
While I like LessTif (ok, and Motif) I like a lot of what GTK and
Gnome have to offer.  Plus, it would be nice to have the ability to
let my applications take advantage of their window manager /
windowing environment.

If anyone has done something similar, or can think of some ways to
work around the differences in paradigms between the windowing
systems (esp. OS/2 PM and Windows / Motif BulletinBoard and GTK)
and wouldn't mind passing on how they did this, I would really
appreciate it.

Thanks,
Larry Morley