Visually Design Your GUI

Sun WorkShop Visual is an interactive tool that facilitates the development of a Motif or Microsoft Windows graphical user interface (GUI). You can see what the interface looks like and how it behaves while you are building it.

Create your user interface by clicking through a Motif widget hierarchy from an easily accessible icon palette and assembling the widgets in a construction area on your screen. You can add custom and third-party widgets to the palette as you need them, and take advantage of existing code.

Some important Sun WorkShop Visual features are:

• A simple, easy-to-use GUI designer

• Layout and pixmap editors

• Font and color choosers

• Full access to the Motif API

• Protection against invalid settings

• Code generation for C, C++, and UIL code

• Extensible widget palette

• Support for code reuse

• Support for developing Microsoft Windows GUIs using Microsoft Foundation Classes (available separately as an option)

Automatically Generate C++ and C Code

When you have finished testing your user interface, you can automatically generate highly portable code in traditional Kernighan and Ritchie (K&R) C or standard ANSI C, as well as structured code, using C++ classes.

Reuse Code

Use the structured code generation features of Sun WorkShop Visual to create reusable definitions and instances. A definition is a hierarchy of widgets whose root widget has been designated a class. When you create a definition, its hierarchy is frozen and an icon that creates instances of the class is added to the widget palette.

Develop Across Platforms

You can also use Sun WorkShop Visual to generate code for Microsoft Windows, using Microsoft Foundation Classes. Although the Motif and X toolkits are similar in appearance to the Microsoft Windows toolkit, the use of the toolkits is very different. Handle these differences in Sun WorkShop Visual using Windows mode. Use Sun WorkShop Visual's color cuing to set restrictions on generating Microsoft Windows code for a design. A design that conforms to the restrictions is said to be Windows-compliant, and C++ code can be generated for the Microsoft Foundation Classes.

This feature is available as an option.