If You Decide to Port

If you decide that you definitely want to port, think of the process as an art and not as a science. There is no magic tool that will perform the port for you. There is no foolproof algorithm to follow that works every time. What you really need to do is learn Motif and CDE, and understand the CDE style guidelines. This takes time and patience.

Benefits of Porting

Benefits of porting to the CDE desktop include:

• Taking advantage of new features offered by CDE

• Providing easy portability on a wide variety of platforms

• Enabling better "ease of use" by ensuring that your application behaves according to the CDE style guidelines

• Providing interoperability with other Solaris CDE applications in areas where the Solaris CDE and OpenWindows environments differ, for example:

  • Window manager interaction

  • Drag and drop

  • Session management

Integrating into the Solaris CDE Environment

Recommended and optional integration require changes to your code to implement the functionality within these categories. Your application will be even more integrated with the desktop the more CDE functionality you adopt.

Recommended Integration

The Solaris CDE development environment contains components and guidelines so that your application will integrate well with other applications on the desktop:

• Help system

• ToolTalk messaging system

• Session Manager

• Drag and drop

• Internationalization

• Standard font names

• Error message guidelines

• User customization issues

Optional Integration

The following Solaris CDE components enable you to leverage services provided by the desktop for achieving specialized tasks:

• Solaris Motif control widgets

• Data typing

• Action invocation

• Workspace Manager

• Terminal widget

• Text editor widget

• Calendar API

• Desktop Korn shell