SunView (Sun Visual/Integrated Environment for Workstations) is a discontinued user interface toolkit and windowing system from

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

, launched in 1985, and included as part of its

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user 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, starting with SunOS Release 3.0. Sun had introduced support in 1983 for a window-based environment known as the Sun Window System, providing the Sunwindows (or SunWindows) window manager and Suntools (or SunTools) user interface toolkit. SunWindows was one of the first widely used Unix window systems and, unlike later Unix windowing systems, relied on dedicated support in the system kernel, albeit limited to window hierarchy management and therefore being less invasive than other early window system implementations. In SunWindows, graphics device operations were performed by applications and not in the kernel. SunView was introduced as an object-oriented toolkit layer on top of the SunWindows platform to address the increasing complexity of the underlying system and to facilitate the development of user interfaces. SunView ran on Sun's desktop and deskside

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, 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 syste ...

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 OpenWindows is a discontinued desktop environment for Sun Microsystems workstations which combined a display server supporting the X Window System protocol, the XView and OLIT toolkits, the OPEN LOOK Window Manager (olwm), and the DeskSet product ...

desktop environment. The DeskSet tools became a unifying element at the end of the Unix wars, 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. 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 News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the te ...

, a more sophisticated window system based on

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

; however, the actual successor turned out to be

, whose window server supported SunView,

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 originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

. 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 An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

similar to that of SunView, simplifying the transition for developers between the two environments. Sun later announced its migration to the

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

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 CDE, marking the end of Sun's 20-year-plus history of using the SunView/DeskSet code base. CDE, including the DeskSet components it used, was open sourced in 2012.

References

{{Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems software Windowing systems Widget toolkits 1985 software