rprobst@SUN.COM (Richard Probst) (09/30/88)
In separate messages, Antonio Romero and Roderick Sprattling asked about porting SunView applications to X11. The easiest way to move SunView applications to X11 is to hope that someone else will port the SunView toolkit to X11, with as much source compatibility as possible. That is exactly what Sun has done. The second version of SunView, called View2, is an X11 toolkit currently in alpha test by application developers within Sun. View2 uses Xlib, but not the Xt intrinsics. That is, it is not a set of widgets. Instead, we took the existing SunView code and moved it onto Xlib. The benefit of this is that we kept a high degree of source compatibility. SunView applications can be converted to View2 applications in a small number of days. We did not strive for full recompile-&-go source compatibility, because moving to a network window system does introduce some unavoidable changes, but the conversion is simple and fairly mechanical. Many Sun applications have been converted and are being tested. View2-based tools are now up and running on Sun3, Sun4, Sun386i, and on a microVax in our engineering lab. On the Suns, View2 runs on top of X11/NeWS. On the microVax, View2 runs on top of X11R3. Sun will not ship the microVax port; it was done purely to demonstrate portability. View2 provides the OPEN LOOK user interface. To get full OPEN LOOK on the screen, you also need to use an OPEN LOOK window manager. View2-based tools can work with other window managers, such as uwm, but do not then look like the OPEN LOOK spec (and since Sun has adopted OPEN LOOK as our UI policy, we don't intend to test this configuration). View2 communicates with a window manager according to the ICCCM draft standard. To dispel possible confusion, note that there are several toolkits implementing the OPEN LOOK user interface. OPEN LOOK is a spec, not a toolkit. Other announced OPEN LOOK toolkits are Xt+ from AT&T, and NDE (which runs on top of the NeWS side of X11/NeWS). The View2 libraries will ship with the X11/NeWS server in 1989. Beta sites have already been selected and contacted. --Richard Probst (rprobst@sun.com) Manager for SunView and View2