XView is awidget toolkit fromSun Microsystems introduced in 1988. It provides anOPEN LOOK user interface forX Window System applications, with an object-orientedapplication programming interface (API) for theC programming language. Its interface, controls, and layouts are very close to that of the earlierSunView window system, making it easy to convert existing applications from SunView to X. Sun also produced theUser Interface Toolkit (UIT), aC++ API to XView.
XView provides a semi-futuristic hi-tech user interface forX Window System applications which had been standardized by a larger group of manufacturers and software companies as the "OPEN LOOK system's specification".
The XView source code has been freely available since the early 1990s, making it the "firstopen-source professional-quality X Window System toolkit".[1] XView was later abandoned by Sun in favor ofMotif (the basis ofCDE), and more recentlyGTK+ (the basis ofGNOME).
SunView was reputedly the first system to use right-buttoncontext menus,[1] which are now ubiquitous among computer user interfaces; XView as the first "instance" for X ported the contextual concept to the X Window System.
The last XView releases included true-color patches and XPM/JPEG/PNG patches for the menus and icons. Internationalization (aka.I17N) is supported, but Unicode or UTF-8/16/32 are not, simply because XView is older than them. And, of course, the open-source XView does not support DPS/NeWS/HyperTalk. In modern terms, XView is just a framework supplying a WM and demos.
Although it is possible to compile XView under modern Unix/X11 systems[2], it is a 32bit-only toolkit written inC89 which major modern compiler suites might refuse to compile cleanly (especially theolvwm window manager), and the massive changes introduced into many libraries make them (the libraries) incompatible to C89 code, like is the case with theGNU LibC6, although most of the current compilers offer to compile C89 code via the "-std=c89" switch. Making the altered library structures compatible with C89 code is a bit of manual labor, both by adding symlinks into the right places and a bit of changing the code which is intended to be compiled.
In addition to that, restrictive system daemons like SELinux and systemd are likely to make XView exit with errors andSIGSEGV upon startup because they mess around with memory allocation and library loading in a way not compatible with the original UNIX concept.
Although Sun had dropped XView from the Solaris releases starting with Solaris 10, they are available as backwards-compatibility packages calledOWACOMP (OpenWindows Application COMPatibility), which have once been officially provided by Sun Microsystems. For Solaris 10 and 11 and oldRedHat Enterprise Linux releases (which had been officially supported by Sun) there are mirrors of those packages available onhttp://sourceforge.net/projects/owacomp. Note that those feature XViev 3.3, without DPS support.