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.