GUI Construction

The easiest way to produce your first Common Desktop Environment application, and perhaps the fastest, is to do almost no Motif toolkit programming at all. Use the Common Desktop Environment Application Builder, also known as App Builder, to construct the GUI control portion of your application. App Builder focuses on making default widget behavior easy to access. It does this by hiding many of the more esoteric resources that are available on most widgets. App Builder also makes it as easy to incorporate desktop integration infrastructure into your application, including drag and drop, session management, and ToolTalk messaging.

App Builder is a good learning tool. A full-featured Motif GUI builder called XDesigner is available for purchase from the Sun Microsystems Advanced Developer Tools organization.

App Builder maintains the user interface state in Builder Interface Language (BIL) files. A code generator takes the BIL files and produces Motif toolkit code. App Builder can also generate User Interface Language (UIL) files.

As you make changes to your application's user interface, App Builder merges your custom code with the code it generates. Generated code is a good source of example code, even if you do not using App Builder to maintain your application's GUI state.

In addition, non-programmers can use App Builder to produce an application GUI prototype. The prototype can roll forward to programmers for the production phase of development.