eXene — a Multi-threaded, Higher-order User-interface Toolkit for the X Window System

Introduction

Up through the mid-1990s, Emden Gansner and John Reppy designed and implemented eXene — a multi-threaded, higher-order user-interface toolkit for the X window system. EXene is implemented in Concurrent ML (CML), which is a Standard ML of New Jersey (SML/NJ) library, and is provided as part of the SML/NJ distribution. EXene has many appealing attributes and is certainly usable in its current state. But it suffers from some deficiencies which have limited its use, and there are a number of ways in which it could usefully be improved.

Publications on eXene

• Gansner, E.R. and J.H. Reppy. "A Multi-threaded Higher-order User Interface Toolkit". User Interface Software, Volume 1 of Software Trends, Wiley, 1993.
• Gansner, E.R. and J.H. Reppy. "eXene". 1991 CMU Workshop on SML, 1991.
• A. Stoughton. Infinite Pretty-printing in eXene. Trends in Functional Programming, vol. 3, pp. 13-24. Intellect, 2002.

EXene manuals (somewhat out-of-date)

• EXene library manual
• EXene widgets manual

Other X resources

• X Window System Protocol
• Inter-client Communication Conventions Manual

Subsequent Work on eXene

In the 2000s, I led a group at Kansas State University that continued the development of eXene. Group members included:

• Imran Hameed
• Dustin deBoer
• Jonathan Hoag
• Matthew Hoag
• Cole Hoosier

Here are our writings on eXene:

• Dusty deBoer and Alley Stoughton wrote a position paper on On The Future of eXene.
• This was followed by Dusty deBoer's master's thesis Enhancements to EXene: an X windowing toolkit for Standard ML. The development version of eXene described in this thesis, as well as the demos described in the thesis, are also available.
• Matthew Hoag's master's thesis Revitalizing EXene built on Dusty deBoer's work. See the development version of eXene, below, for the resulting code and documentation.

Development Version of eXene

The development version of eXene is hosted on the University of Chicago's FusionForge site.