Sunview - X server

[Brian Raymor - TSE Sun Washington DC]

Richard Probst, the manager for View2, posted the following message to the
window news groups.

brian

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 at sun.com)
	Manager for SunView and View2