XView

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SunOS XView calctool
SunOS XView calctool

XView is a widget toolkit from Sun Microsystems introduced in 1988, providing an OPEN LOOK user interface for X Window System applications. It has the same look and feel of the earlier SunView system, and provides a similar object-oriented application programming interface for the C programming language. Sun also produced the User Interface Toolkit (UIT), a C++ API to XView. The XView source code has been freely available since the early 1990s, making it the “first open-source professional-quality X Window System toolkit” [1]. XView was later abandoned by Sun in favor of Motif (the basis of CDE), and more recently GTK+ (the basis of GNOME).

XView was reputedly the first system to use right-button context menus [2], which are now ubiquitous among computer user interfaces. However, the claim to that first may in fact lie with Acorn Computers' Arthur operating system, which was released in 1987, though it used the middle mouse button rather than the right.

Software bugs mean XView will not compile on hybrid 32-bit/64-bit systems like AMD64.

The name xview is also one of the aliases for xloadimage, an image viewer for the X Window System.

[edit] References

  • Dan Heller, XView Programming Manual (O'Reilly & Associates, 1991) ISBN 0-937175-87-0
  • Thomas Van Raalte, ed. XView Reference Manual (O'Reilly & Associates, 1991) ISBN 0-937175-88-9

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

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