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From: cflatter@ZIA.AOC.NRAO.EDU (Chris Flatters)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re:  XView info/opinions
Message-ID: <9012061716.AA03832@zia.aoc.nrao.edu>
Date: 6 Dec 90 17:16:09 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 40


Brian Russ writes:
> It's my understanding that XView, in addition to being a
> full-fledged X toolkit, was designed to facilitate converting
> SunViews applications to X -- even to the extent that (this is
> where my memory or understanding may be way off) there exists a
> translator that converts SunViews calls to XView calls, and that
> this translator is part of the XView package.
>	Is my understanding at all correct? 

Correct so far.  The conversions done by convert_to_xview tend to
be incomplete but it is better than having to rewrite the whole
application.

> If not, are there other ways of "quickly" porting SunViews
> applications to X?  I presume that XView maintains it's own look-and-
> feel, close to SunView and not close to, say, Motif or OpenLook --
> this is not important to us, though we more or less want to stay away
> from OpenLook.

XView is a certified level-one OPEN LOOK toolkit (and what's wrong with
that?).

XView is a full featured X Window System toolkit.  The amount of knowledge
required to build XView applications appears to be lower than for Xt
based toolkits (but some may disagree with this).  It has the occasional
bug but is no worse in that respect than any other toolkit.

XView 2 is freely available as source code from xview.ucdavis.edu and expo.lcs.mit.edu. This runs on Sun machines.  I gather that patches
for DECstations and POWERstations are about to appear RSN, but hadn't
shown up last time I looked.  I believe that some X archive sites may
still have version 1 of XView with the necessary patches for
DECstations running Ultrix 3.x.  From the looks of the insides, porting
XView to a bsd system should present no special difficulties.  System V
would be a bit more complicated since the notifier package has a 
marked bsd flavour (most notably it uses Berkeley timer semantics).
I assume that porting to System V will get easier as Sun migrate their
systems to SVr4.

			Chris Flatters