Xview info

[Rob Savoye]

I thought I'd try to answer the request for XView info in sun-spots 276.
I've been alpha testing the X/NeWS server and Xview for several months.
It's kinda interesting to run sunview binaries, X binaries, and NDE
binaries on the same screen at the same time. The alpha versions were a
little slow, but the new beta version is much better, of course. Anyway,
XView is about 95% (my number) compatible with sunview. They supply a
coversion program (sh script) that makes a pretty good attempt at the
conversion. Most of the "port" to XView was just replacing a
window_create() function with vu_create() etc... Most of the attributes
have stayed the same, there are some new ones though. We converted a
30,000 line sunview application in a few hours, this includes our learning
curve cause we did this with X/NeWS right out of the box. It ran fine
except for a few documented bugs (which are now gone). It took another 30
man-hours or so to convert the entire program to use every feature of
XView from footers to push-pins. It worked well enough that we demoed it
in the Sun booth at Uniforum. Most of the changes were in the window
creation functions. Alot of our "porting" was actually ripping out our
code that did fancy things that XView now does for you. (like status
lines) XView is a superset of sunview. You can now program cmdtool style
tty's in your program and the textsw handling functions have been extended
alot. (programmable split screens !) We are now porting XView to xlib
running a our transputer boxes, when it's done I'll do another posting. We
liked XView enough that we are actually developing code under sunview and
Xview. They are similar enough that a compile time option can handle it.
If I see any more questions on the net I'll try to post answers as I can.

Rob Savoye
Topologix, Inc.
4860 Ward Rd.
Denver, CO 80033
(303) 421-7700
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