wxCLIPS Q&A


What is wxCLIPS?

wxCLIPS is a simple graphical development environment to allow you to load and run CLIPS applications. In addition, it extends CLIPS with hundreds of functions to allow graphical user interfaces to be constructed, largely portable between X and Windows platforms. Although most people won't require this, wxCLIPS can be compiled as a library to be used as an emebedded language/GUI development tool for any C++ application.

There is an object-oriented COOL wrapper for much of the GUI functionality.

Although wxCLIPS applications are mostly built programmatically, you can use the wxWidgets dialog editor to help build attractive dialogs and panels.

wxCLIPS is available in a FuzzyCLIPS version.

What platforms are supported?

Currently, virtually all varieties of UNIX are potentially supported, and all C++ compilers, the most popular UNIX platforms being Linux and Sun. On UNIX, Motif and XView are supported to different extents. Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows NT are supported (including NT on non-Intel platforms) and (as far as we know) all commercial Windows compilers are capable of compiling wxCLIPS.

However, this does not mean that binaries are available for all these platforms: but all source is available. For building FuzzyCLIPS versions of wxCLIPS, you will need to obtain the FuzzyCLIPS source code from its authors. Patches are available for the small modifications that wxCLIPS needs: see compiling wxCLIPS.

There is a Mac port of the underlying wxWidgets library, but so far wxCLIPS has not been ported to the Mac.

Is wxCLIPS free?

Yes; you can use it and modify in any application you want, research, personal or commercial. Obviously we would prefer you didn't sell it for money unless you're offering some additional benefit. Unlike software restricted by the GNU licence, you do not have to distribute any source code with your application.

The CLIPS source code is subject to some pretty lenient rules of distribution, the most pertinent being that if you obtain the CLIPS source from someone who purchased it from COSMIC (the official distributor), you're OK; and you can download it from the CMU site with no problems.

The use of CLIPS in binary versions of wxCLIPS and Hardy has been verified in writing by COSMIC, so there is absolutely no licensing problem.

Who develops and maintains wxCLIPS?

wxCLIPS was started in 1992 by Julian Smart at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, part of the University of Edinburgh. wxCLIPS is a spin-off from two projects, wxWidgets and Hardy. wxWidgets provides the underlying portable GUI layer, and the meta-CASE tool Hardy required an embedded language capable of being used to program GUIs: hence wxCLIPS.

Julian is now a freelance consultant, but continues to maintain wxCLIPS as a background task.

Who uses wxCLIPS?

Many organisations - commercial, government, and academic - across the world. It's difficult to estimate the true number of users.

How is wxWidgets distributed?

Principally by ftp, but in the future, will be on the wxWidgets CD-ROM which is expected to be released sometime in 1997.

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