Use Transition Tools

No one tool on the market will do everything you need for transitioning your application to the Solaris CDE desktop. Nonetheless, depending on different aspects of your application, you may find tools to solve some of your problems. These specialized tools can make the transition easier.

As you research the tools available to you, ask yourself if any are a good match for your application transition and what you are trying to do.

Tools to Transition to Motif

Many third-party tools are offered to transition to Motif. For example, Integrated Computer Solutions (ICS) offers two converters: one translates XView source code to GIL files and one translates GIL files to Motif source code.

SunSoft's Devguide offers Motif Conversion Utilities as a way of helping customers make the transition. Devguide's front end is still in the OPEN LOOK user interface, and it has the same OPEN LOOK palette, but you can use the Motif Conversion Utilities to transform GIL files into UIL files or Motif and C code. Use the Motif Conversion Utilities (guil and gmf) in the Solaris 2.4 Software Developer's Kit to convert GIL files to UIL and Motif C code. UIL files can be imported into Motif GUI builders to generate Motif-based GUIs.

SunSoft also provides a Motif GUI builder called SunSoft Visual WorkShop.

Note that using transition tools for GUI migration results in a GUI that you will probably need to refine to be CDE style-guide compliant. You may need less time to re-layout the GUI if you use a GUI builder tool.

Tools to Transition to the Solaris CDE Desktop

If you used Devguide to create your application, you can use App Builder's GIL-to-BIL converter to create BIL files, which is the format the App Builder uses. BIL file format is similar to GIL file format. However, BIL files contain CDE-specific information and produce a Solaris Motif GUI. The GIL-to-BIL converter makes some educated conversion guesses based on heuristics, which might not give you the result you want. For best results, take the BIL files that the converter produces, load them into App Builder, and modify the user interface as needed.

App Builder is a tool in the Solaris CDE environment that is very similar to Devguide, which is used in the OpenWindows environment. Transitioning to CDE in this manner solves a significant number of conversion problems. Because App Builder generates files for you, these files are easier to manipulate than C code you would have to write yourself. App Builder preserves application stubs files, so your application-specific code is unchanged. It also uses the same file-naming conventions as Devguide.

If you did not use Devguide, there are currently no third-party tools to use for converting OPEN LOOK applications to CDE. Try a Motif conversation tool such as is discussed in "Tools to Transition to Motif" above.