XView

XView is a widget toolkit from Sun Microsystems introduced in 1988 and forming the basis of the OpenWindows desktop environment for Sun's MIPS and SPARC based SunOS/Solaris workstations. As such, XView is the direct successor of the former UI system SunView, when Sun decided to switch to the X Window System Version 10 (X10) UI server and build its next-generation user interface on the graphical standard system of UNIX. Like SunView before, XView largely supported DisplayPostScript (DPS), a networked PostScript variant developed by Sun, which was used for networked and remote applications and seamless integration of network-wide UI elements. DPS and its later descendants NeWS and HyperTalk were only available on Sun systems since they required a specially modified X server supporting the DPS protocol, which was never open-sourced or released in binary form for other architectures than Sun's own. DPS was supported in XView until its release 3.2 and was removed in release 3.3 in favor of the X Display Management Communications Protocol (XDMCP) of the X Window System which has similar capabilities. DPS was never supported by the open-sourced XView, only by the closed-source commercial SunOS and Solaris operating systems (which were later bought by Caldera, then by Oracle, when Sun re-focused onto the workstation market and its own new SunRay administration and server/cloud server system).

XView provides a semi-futuristic hi-tech user interface for X Window System applications which had been standardized by a larger group of manufacturers and software companies as the „OPEN LOOK system's specification”, with an object-oriented application programming interface (API) for the C programming language. Its interface, controls, and layouts are very close to that of the earlier SunView window system, making it easy to convert existing applications from SunView to X. Sun also produced the User Interface Toolkit (UIT), a C++ API to XView.

The XView source code has been freely available since the early 1990s, making it the "first open-source professional-quality X Window System toolkit".^[1] XView was later abandoned by Sun in favor of Motif (the basis of CDE), and more recently GTK+ (the basis of GNOME).

SunView was reputedly the first system to use right-button context menus,^[1] which are now ubiquitous among computer user interfaces; XView as the first „instance” for X ported the contextual concept to the X Window System.

differences between open-source XView and Sun OpenWindows

The major difference is that XView misses most of the applications and utilities Sun shipped with the OpenWindows environment; XView mainly consists of two different window managers (olwm and olvwm, the latter offering virtual desktops [hence the „v”] and enhanced configuration options), the toolkit libraries and headers, and a few demonstrational applications which are available as source code and in compiled form. Although the two graphical ksh wrappers „cmdtool” and „shelltool” are included, a more modern terminal like XTerm ought to be used instead since the two tools provide very limited subsets of VT capabilities (barely VT52 level) and cannot handle Unicode or UTF.

The last XView releases included true-color patches and XPM/JPEG/PNG patches for the menus and icons. Internationalization (aka. I17N) is supported, but Unicode or UTF-8/16/32 are not, simply because XView is older than them. And, of course, the open-source XView does not support DPS/NeWS/HyperTalk. In modern terms, XView is just a framework supplying a WM and demos.

XView (open-source) and modern systems

Although it is possible to compile XView under modern Unix/X11 systems, it is a 32bit-only toolkit written in C89 which major modern compiler suites might refuse to compile cleanly (especially the olvwm window manager), and the massive changes introduced into many libraries make them (the libraries) incompatible to C89 code, like is the case with the GNU LibC6, although most of the current compilers offer to compile C89 code via the „-std=c89” switch. Making the altered library structures compatible with C89 code is a bit of manual labor, both by adding symlinks into the right places and a bit of changing the code which is intended to be compiled.

In addition to that, restrictive system daemons like SELinux and systemd are likely to make XView exit with errors and SIGSEGV upon startup because they mess around with memory allocation and library loading in a way not compatible with the original UNIX concept.

using XView on Solaris 10 and 11 and OpenSolaris/Illumos descendants

Although Sun had dropped XView from the Solaris releases starting with Solaris 10, they are available as backwards-compatibility packages called OWACOMP (OpenWindows Application COMPatibility), which have once been officially provided by Sun Microsystems. For Solaris 10 and 11 and old RedHat Enterprise Linux releases (which had been officially supported by Sun) there are mirrors of those packages available on http://sourceforge.net/projects/owacomp. Note that those feature XViev 3.3, without DPS support.