Start Small

If you plan to port your application to the Solaris CDE desktop, or if you want to practice porting, start with a small example and work your way up.

Convert and Clean Up

With small applications that have simple GUIs, you can practice porting by using a two-step process:

• Convert the GUI object-by-object from the OPEN LOOK user interface to Motif. (See "Use a Motif GUI Builder" below.)

• Clean up the resulting GUI so that it adheres to the CDE style guidelines. Take advantage of this opportunity to review the GUI for ease-of-use and customer-specific issues. You might decide to change the interface, even if the object-by-object conversion is style-guide compliant.

Chapter 7, Porting Example: OPEN LOOK to Solaris Motif, takes a simple OPEN LOOK application and illustrates this process.

This is not the recommended way to port large, real-life applications.

Use a Motif GUI Builder

Use a Motif GUI builder such as Application Builder (App Builder) or SunSoft Visual WorkShop^TM to build the new Motif GUI for the application. You need flexibility to experiment and make changes when you port using the two-step process described in "Convert and Clean Up". If you manually code in a particular GUI, it is difficult and time consuming to make modifications. App Builder provides flexibility by enabling you to drag and drop objects to easily create prototype GUIs. It generally requires less time to use a GUI builder to lay out a new Motif interface than it does trying to port the GUI by hand.

In fact, whatever porting process you use and no matter how large your application, you should consider using a Motif GUI builder. These builders produce the GUI and application framework code, which frees your time to focus on application code.