11. CDE - Common Desktop Environment 11. CDE - Common Desktop Environment Common Desktop Environment is a graphical desktop environment created from the combined technologies of its four sponsors: SunSoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Novell. The Common Desktop Environment establishes a new standard for rapid development of heterogeneous client/server solutions and provides multi-platform GUI and API set consistency. This consistency means that users will have the same look and feel and that developers will have the same set of API regardless of the platform vendor.
The Common Desktop Environment is based on standards including Motif 1.2 and the X Window System. In addition, the Common Desktop Environment supports the ToolTalk messaging protocol, MIME (Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions) attachments for electronic mail, and XAPIA - X.400 Application Program Interface Association - calendaring and scheduling APIs. The Common Desktop Environment also has its own additional set of APIs to support drag and drop, session management, etc.
Building your applications on the Common Desktop Environment's open standards means that you can easily port your software from one platform to another, sometimes with as little effort as recompiling. In addition, with ToolTalk and X11, you can create applications which can run on one vendor's server while being presented on a different vendor's Common Desktop Environment client.
One piece of the Common Desktop Environment application set
is the Application Builder which provides a visual development
environment for creating Common Desktop Environment applications.
While similar to many GUI-based development environments, the
Application Builder also supports ToolTalk, Drag and Drop,
Session Management, and Help. This means that it is easier for
you to develop Common Desktop Environment client/server
applications from the Application Builder environment than from
any other GUI-based development environment.
The Common Desktop Environment addresses the problem of heterogeneous environments by providing a common desktop paradigm and a consistent set of APIs. This reduces the learning curve for users moving between different hardware and software platforms. In addition, a user can easily launch a Common Desktop Environment application from anywhere on the network, and have that application displayed on their system.
Fig. 11.1 : CDE Front Panel
For more information see http://www.sun.com/cgi-bin/show?sunsoft/catflash/CDE.html
