NAME:

Galaxy, V2.02

 

VENDOR:

Visix 11440 Commerce Park Drive

Reston, Virginia 22091

(800) 832-8668 (inquiries)

(703) 758-2711 (voice)

Email: galaxy@visix.com

 

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION:

There are C++ and C versions of this library. The package includes a WYSIWYG GUI builder. They ship the tools with static and dynamically loaded libraries, debugging libraries, as well as single- and multi-look-and-feel versions. The tools are, reportedly, pretty full-featured. User-interface items have extensive abstraction (for example, they have a confirmation-type dialog that resolves to a push-pin and 'apply' button under OpenLook, but 'ok', 'apply', 'cancel' buttons under motif). Also, errors are handled with an abstract exception handling framework. They support geometry management and internationalization of typefaces (at least Japanese), money, and data formatting. Finally, they have a portable help engine. Some extra-cool features include memory leak detection and C-language objects for text (multi-styled, multi-font text with embedded graphics), list (spreadsheet-like for handling up to 2^31 x 2^31 cells with customizable displays), and graphics processing. They include lots of high-level objects for use by developers; these objects include a font chooser, an icon editor, a directory browser (for file selection), and a color chooser. In addition to a GUI portability platform, Galaxy also includes inter-process communication (IPC), extensive filesystem, and sound support portability across platforms.

 

SUPPORT:

You get no support when you buy the product. If you buy the support, it includes product updates and phone access to their developers. According to one of Galaxy's developers "not buying support is really a false economy".

 

COMMENTS:

These guys have implemented a full superset approach to their API. Often, their objects are more capable than the native-mode object would if you had not used their code. Like Neuron data, they're an emulated API (they don't layer on-top of other tools); they compile, for example, down to Xlib under Motif or OpenLook. This software won Unix Review's Outstanding Product Award (1993) for Software Development Front-Ends. They claim support for MS-Windows v3.1, but support is only for (the still buggy) Win32s and not Win16 (well, actually, if you use Watcom, they have their own version of Win32 for MS-Windows 3.1). Contrary to popular belief, Visix is not planning (as of 15 June 1994) to drop their policy of requiring (costly) training in order to get an evaluation copy of Galaxy. Visix was founded in 1989 and is privately held. Galaxy has been in development since 1986 and has been on-the-market since 1992. Over 2,000 copies of Galaxy has been licensed to more than 250 companies.

 

WHAT THE USERS SAY:

One user says, "If you are looking at cross-platform development environments, you absolutely MUST take a look at Galaxy, from Visix Software. Very good interface builder, covers ALL layers of the API, from GUI to networking, very well designed API, C++ version, etc. [...] We have had good results with it so far." Another user agrees, "I've been using their software for almost 2 years now and I love it", adding, "I lead a project that had > 80K lines of C / C++ that had less than 100 lines [different] between the SunOS and MS-Windows versions." But others chide them for their 1 week class requirement for an evaluation copy, "I looked at Galaxy. It seems to be a nice package, but [...] If you want to give it a try, you MUST take their 1 week class for about $1800.00 and what manager is going to allocate funds", "... and time [...] This required one week trip to Visix class was probably the reason we ended up with another package."

 

REVIEWER'S IMPRESSIONS:

These guys have been extremely helpful getting their portion of this FAQ going. I think that this could be indicative of seriously superlative support (that's an awful lot of alliteration). Using their C product produces extremely verbose code; it seems to me that they should hide more of the detail from the programmer. Most of the extraneous code can be cut from their examples and pasted into your application, but good luck figuring out what that code does. On the other hand, once the cut-and-paste tango is accomplished, one can achieve quite good results. As with many other PIGUIs I've seen, the learning curve is nearly vertical (and the documentation doesn't help much) but once you've gotten used to the API, you can get some neat things done.