SunView (Sun Visual Integrated Environment for Workstations, originally SunTools) is a discontinued

windowing system In computing, a windowing system (or window system) is software that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm for ...

from

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

developed in the early 1980s. It was included as part of

SunOS SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based on BSD, while versions 5.0 ...

, Sun's

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

implementation; unlike later UNIX windowing systems, much of it was implemented in the system

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine lea ...

. SunView ran on Sun's desktop and deskside

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''worksta ...

s, providing an interactive graphical environment for technical computing, document publishing, medical, and other applications of the 1980s, on high resolution monochrome, greyscale and color displays.

Bundled productivity applications

SunView includes a full suite of productivity applications, including an email reader, calendaring tool, text editor, clock, preferences, and menu management interface (all GUIs). The idea of shipping such clients and the associated server software with the base OS was several years ahead of the rest of the industry. Sun's original SunView application suite was later ported to X, featuring the OPEN LOOK look and feel. Known as the DeskSet productivity tool set, this was one distinguishing element of Sun's OpenWindows desktop environment. The DeskSet tools became a unifying element at the end of the

Unix wars The Unix wars were struggles between vendors to set a standard for the Unix operating system in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Origins Although AT&T Corporation created Unix, by the 1980s, the University of California, Berkeley Computer Syste ...

, where the open systems industry was embroiled in a battle which would last for years. As part of the COSE initiative, it was decided that Sun's bundled applications would be ported yet again, this time to the Motif widget toolkit, and the result would be part of

CDE CDE may refer to: Education * California Department of Education * Career Development Event, a type of contest sponsored by the National FFA Organization * Center for Data Engineering, IIIT Hyderabad * Center for Distance Education at University of ...

. This became the standard for a time across all open systems vendors. The full suite of group productivity applications that Sun had bundled with the desktop workstations turned out to be a significant legacy of SunView. While the underlying windowing infrastructure changed, protocols changed, and windowing systems changed, the Sun applications remained largely the same, maintaining interoperability with previous implementations.

Successors

SunView was intended to be superseded by NeWS, a more sophisticated window system based on PostScript; however, the actual successor turned out to be OpenWindows, whose window server supported SunView, NeWS and the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting ...

. Support for the display of SunView programs was phased out after Solaris 2.2. Sun provided a toolkit for X called XView, with an API similar to that of SunView, simplifying the transition for developers between the two environments. Sun later announced its migration to the GNOME

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphi ...

from

, presumably marking the end of the 20-year-plus history of the SunView/DeskSet code base.

References

{{Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems software Windowing systems Widget toolkits