IST offers a unique combination of services and migration tools to provide a complete, fast and cost-effective migration path for moving your C/C++ and UIL based Motif application to Qt. Our automated process completes a migration in a fraction of the time it would take to re-code your application from the ground up or convert manually.

The Motif to Qt Migration process

When porting a Motif based application to Qt there are essentially two areas that need to be addressed:

Conversion of the User Interface design

This stage involves converting the "front-end" code that builds and displays the user interface for the application to Qt. Typically, this part of the application will either have been designed using a Motif GUI Builder or coded by hand using C, C++ or UIL.

To address this stage of the process our X-Designer product is used to translate the Motif GUI into an intermediate XML format. If the Motif application was developed in UIL or using a Motif GUI Builder these GUI files can be automatically converted into XML format using X-Designer's import filters. In cases where the GUI was hand coded using C or C++ X-Designer's unique XD/Capture utility is used to capture the GUI design from the running application without the need to access the source code.

After conversion the intermediate XML format is further translated to Qt Designer's .ui save file format. This phase of the process also performs all the necessary mappings from the Motif widgets and dialog layouts to Qt specific equivalents.

Conversion of GUI toolkit API calls in the back end code

In addition to the "front end" GUI design code there are also significant amounts of GUI toolkit specific code embedded in the "back end" application code. This is the code that brings the user interface to life and controls the interaction between the user and the application logic. These API calls perform such tasks as setting and getting properties of GUI components, responding to user events and performing graphics drawing. In a Motif based application all of this code is specific to the Motif toolkit and needs to be converted to the appropriate API calls for Qt.

To accelerate this phase of the conversion process IST has developed a suite of in-house migration tools that allow us to automatically identify and rewrite the GUI toolkit dependent code in the backend code base. This context sensitive translation process automatically converts X/Motif API calls to Qt equivalents significantly reducing the time required to complete even the most complex migration. This migration technology is scalable to handle large code bases across large numbers of files.

Finding out more

Alternatively email us at migration@ist-inc.com to find out more about our Motif to Qt Migration solution or to discuss your specific requirements in detail, or call us in the US at 650 919 0200 or in Europe at +44 845 034 0961.