SUNFLASH ! ---------- Sunflash is an electronic mail news service from Sun Microsystems, Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Please address comments to John McLaughlin (sun!sunvice!johnj or johnmclaughlin@sun.COM). (305) 776-7770. Sunflash is targeted at Sun customers and users, not Sun employees as much of the information posted to sunflash is already available to Sun employees. If you have any information that you think would be of value to Sun users and customers, please email it to sun!sunvice!johnj. FOR Your Information -------------------- This is a new product announcement and analysis from the October 9th, EE Times. -johnj ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Electronic Engineering Times October 9, 1989 Unix Interface Gets Help - by: Ray Weiss Mountain View, Calif. --Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Guide design tool gives developers a helping hand - and then some - when it comes to building an Open Look graphical user interface to their applications. The highly interactive Graphical User Interface Design Editor lets designers build an interface without writing a single line of code. Instead, they work with a palette of icons that represent various objects (control functions scroll bars, menus and the like), which can be dragged and dropped in place with a mouse. Once the icon is in the desired locations, Guide automatically generates code to drive the interface, building program templates for the underlying application code. Open Look (with portions of Sun's Open Windows application environment) and Guide will be part of AT&T's System V Unix 4.0 release, due later this year. It will also be added to Unix 3.2, which is already out. In effect, Guide puts Sun and AT&T ahead of their Open System Foundation (OSF) competitors. Also outmaneuvered were operating system/interface combinations like Microsoft/IBM's Windows-DOS and OS/2-Presentation Manager, as well as Hewlett-Packard Co.'s DOS/New Wave. Guide's importance can be seen in the number of major application vendors on hand at its announcement to voice support for Open Look, the underlying graphical user interface. Among them were spokespeople from Lotus Development Corp., Sybase and Oracle. According to Larry Bertram, a program manager at Lotus, Open Look and Sun's Open Windows will provide the simple-to-use tools that are critical to create customer demand for Unix and Unix-based applications. "Guide and Open Look signal the arrival of easy-to-develop Unix applications," said Larry Dooling, president of AT&T's Unix Service Organization. According to Dooling, Guide will be available in both source and binary form for Sparc, as well as for Intel Corp. and Motorola Inc. hardware platforms. Sun, according to marketing vice president Ed Zander, is out to make Open Look and System V the industry standard. Guide will help them gain that acceptance by relieving programmers of the burden of developing application interfaces by hand. In fact, Sun has a lot of firepower in the graphical user interface wars. For one thing, it is the leading workstation vendor, with an installed base of over 175,000, said Zander. For another, Sun plans to be the leading RISC workstation vendor, with the sale of some 100,000 Sparcstations projected for the next 12 months. "We have over 300 development kits out there with developers, and they are porting their applications over to Open Windows," noted Zander. Actually, Open Look is not a product; it is a user interface architecture defined by a specification and a style guide, both of which will be made available by Sun Microsystems. Sun's implementation of Open Look is Open Windows, which was released in March and includes an X.11/News windowing system that integrates the X.11 standard with a PostScript drawing engine. It also contains support tools, including Guide. Guide was built using the emerging graphics user-interface technology. It is language based. Each time a user picks and places an interface icon, a language description is automatically generated to describe the addition. Thus, a program in a special Lisp-like graphic language is created for each interface. Those interface definitions are translated into the actual interface. Creates templates Guide creates the callback C routines that are entered when for instance, a button is pushed on screen. In essence, Guide creates program templates of the application's functions that interact with the user interface. Developers can prototype their applications, defining the interfaces and linking their associated callback routines to simulate them. Some theorists believe that highly interactive programs can be literally defined by their interfaces rather than by a specification that generates the user interfaces. By treating a program as a black box, its behavior can be defined by a sequence of user interface screens and the stimuli (users) and responses (programs) associated with them. Similar, but not the same Guide follows the same basic principals as NeXT Inc.'s Interface Builder. But because it is coded in C, it lacks the dynamic binding and simulation capability of the NeXT tool. NeXT developers used object-oriented Objective-C, which gave their tools additional flexibility. Also, Sun has not developed the equivalent of NeXT's application builder tools set, NextStep, which enables programmers to pull together programs from interacting chunks or objects. The Guide software is made up of about 25,000 lines of code. One measure of its value, notes developer Brent Browning, is that "we reduced code by about 40 percent when we used Guide, instead of straight C, for its implementation." Guide media and documentation sells unbundled for $250. Open Windows media and documentation costs $295.