Common Desktop Environment: Programmer's Overview

Preface

Contents of Chapter:
Who Should Use This Book
How This Book Is Organized
Related Books
Development Environment Documentation
What Typographic Changes and Symbols Mean
The Common Desktop Environment: Programmer's Overview provides a high-level view of the Common Desktop Environment development environment and the developer documentation set. Read this book first before starting application design and development.

Note: In this manual, the terms (the) Common Desktop Environment and the desktop are used interchangeably.

Outside of the Preface, this manual omits the Common Desktop Environment prefix when referring to a Common Desktop Environment development or run-time environment manual. For example, the Common Desktop Environment: Programmer's Overview is referred to as the Programmer's Overview.

Who Should Use This Book

Read the Programmer's Overview if you are:

For the remainder of this manual, OSF/Motif is referred to as Motif.

How This Book Is Organized

The Programmer's Overview is divided into two parts. Part I contains an architectural overview of the Common Desktop Environment, including high-level information on both the run-time and development environments. Part II contains information useful to know before developing an application, and describes the development environment components.

This section provides brief descriptions of the chapters and appendixes contained in this manual.

Chapter 1, "Architectural Overview," presents an overview of the Common Desktop Environment architecture.

Chapter 2, "Development Environment Considerations," discusses information you should know about the environment before you start to develop an application.

Chapter 3, "Developing an Application," presents information specific to developing a Common Desktop Environment application, such as naming conventions and guidelines to follow.

Chapter 4, "Portability and Maintenance," discusses issues pertaining to writing portable and maintainable applications.

Chapter 5, "Basic Application Integration," summarizes how to make your application launch-integrated (that is, started by double-clicking an icon on the desktop).

Chapter 6, "Recommended Integration," provides overviews of all components and guidelines that you should use so your application has the same look and feel as, and interoperates well with, other Common Desktop Environment desktop applications.

Chapter 7, "Optional Integration," provides overviews of the components to incorporate into your application as needed for added functionality.

Appendix , "Common Desktop Environment Motif" describes the differences between Motif 1.2.3 and Common Desktop Environment Motif.

Appendix , "Component and Guideline Reference" lists in alphabetical order all development environment components and guidelines, with associated library, header files, and documentation.

Related Books

For information on Motif, see:

Note: The Common Desktop Environment: Style Guide and Certification Checklist is an extension of the OSF/Motif 1.2 Style Guide to the Common Desktop Environment.

Motif 1.2 IEEE Std 1295 standard, which you can order from:
IEEE Service Center
445 Hoes Lane
P.O. Box 1331
Piscataway, NJ 08855

For information on POSIX, see the IEEE Std 1003.1-1990 standard, which you can order from:
IEEE Service Center
445 Hoes Lane
P.O. Box 1331
Piscataway, NJ 08855

For information on Xlib, see:

For information on Xt, see:

For more information on ToolTalk, see:

In addition to the Programmer's Overview, the development environment documentation set consists of:

For more information on these development environment books, see the following section, "Development Environment Documentation."

The run-time environment documentation set consists of:

Note: The Advanced User's and System Administrator's Guide contains information to help you integrate an application into the desktop.

Development Environment Documentation

This section provides an overview of each manual--except for the Programmer's Overview--in the developer documentation set.

Common Desktop Environment: Style Guide and Certification Checklist

The Common Desktop Environment: Style Guide and Certification Checklist provides application design style guidelines and the list of requirements for Common Desktop Environment application-level certification. These requirements consist of the Motif Version 1.2 requirements with Common Desktop Environment-specific additions.

The checklist describes keys using a model keyboard mechanism. It assumes that your application is being designed for a left-to-right language environment in an English-language locale. Wherever keyboard input is specified, the keys are indicated by the engravings on the Motif model keyboard. Mouse buttons are described using a virtual button mechanism to better describe behavior independent from the number of buttons on the mouse.

This book provides information to assist the application designer in developing consistent applications and behaviors within the applications.

Common Desktop Environment: Application Builder User's Guide

The Common Desktop Environment Application Builder (also called App Builder) is an interactive tool for developing Common Desktop Environment applications. It provides features that facilitate both the construction of an application graphical user interface (GUI) and the incorporation of the desktop's many useful desktop services (such as Help, ToolTalk, Drag and Drop). The Common Desktop Environment: Application Builder User's Guide explains how to create an interface by dragging and dropping "objects" from a palette. It also explains how to make connections between objects in the interface, how to use the application framework editor to easily integrate desktop services, how to generate C code, and how to add application code to the App Builder output to produce a finished application.

Common Desktop Environment: Programmer's Guide

The Common Desktop Environment: Programmer's Guide has two parts. Each part provides a detailed description of elements of the Common Desktop Environment, a conceptual diagram, and a task-oriented description of how to use each element, complete with code examples.

Part I, "Recommended Integration," provides an overview of basic integration, and describes how to integrate new applications with the Session Manager, fonts, and drag and drop. It also discusses displaying error messages.

Part II, "Optional Integration," describes how to integrate new applications with the Workspace Manager, Common Desktop Environment Motif widgets, actions, data types, and Calendar.

The Programmer's Guide provides an introduction to the application program interfaces (APIs) for the components referred to in the descriptions of Parts I and II above, with cross-references to the relevant man pages. Details are covered in the man pages.

Common Desktop Environment: Help System Author's and Programmer's Guide

The Common Desktop Environment: Help System Author's and Programmer's Guide describes how to develop online help for application software. It covers how to create help topics and how to integrate online help into a Motif application.

The audience for this book includes:

This book has four parts. Part I describes the collaborative role that authors and developers undertake to design application help. Part II provides information for authors organizing and writing online help. Part III describes the Help System application programmer's toolkit. Part IV contains information for both authors and programmers about preparing online help for different language environments.

Common Desktop Environment: ToolTalk Messaging Overview

The Common Desktop Environment: ToolTalk Messaging Overview describes the ToolTalk components, commands, and error messages offered as convenience routines to enable your application to conform to Media Exchange and Desktop Services message set conventions. This manual is for developers who create or maintain applications that use the ToolTalk service to interoperate with other applications.

The ToolTalk Messaging Overview does not describe general ToolTalk functionality. For detailed information about the ToolTalk service, refer to The ToolTalk Service: An Inter-Operability Solution. For tips and techniques to help make using ToolTalk easier, read ToolTalk and Open Protocols: Inter-Application Communication. Both of these books are listed in "Related Books".

Common Desktop Environment: Internationalization Programmer's Guide

The Common Desktop Environment: Internationalization Programmer's Guide provides information for internationalizing an application so that it can be easily localized to support various languages and cultural conventions in a consistent user interface.

Specifically, this guide:

This guide is not intended to duplicate the existing reference or conceptual documentation, but rather to provide guidelines and conventions on specific internationalization topics. It focuses on internationalization topics and not on any specific component or layer in an open software environment.

Common Desktop Environment: Desktop KornShell User's Guide

The Common Desktop Environment: Desktop KornShell User's Guide describes how to create Motif applications with Desktop Korn shell (dtksh) scripts. It contains several example scripts of increasing complexity, in addition to the basic information a developer needs to get started.

This guide is intended for developers who find a shell-style scripting environment suitable for a particular task. It assumes a knowledge of Korn shell programming, Motif, the Xt Intrinsics, and, to a lesser extent, Xlib.

Common Desktop Environment: Product Glossary

The Common Desktop Environment: Product Glossary provides a comprehensive list of terms used in the Common Desktop Environment. The Glossary is the source and reference base for all users of the desktop. Because the audience for this glossary consists of many different types of users--from end users to developers to translators--the format for a glossary definition may include information about the audience, where the term originated, and the Common Desktop Environment component that uses the term in its graphical user interface.

What Typographic Changes and Symbols Mean

The following table describes the type changes and symbols used in this book.

Table P-1 Typographic Conventions

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