The HP Visual User Environment (HP ...

The HP Visual User Environment (HP VUE) combined with a station of applications, is a powerful graphical environment for interacting with the computer It provides a consistent user interface and is based upon OSF/Motif, which was created to enable different applications to behave the same way, eliminating the ne for users to learn multiple command locates to control applications.

The ne for standards was recognized early according to Hewlett-Packard with its support for industry standards as it is as the X Consortium and the exhibit Software Foundation (OSF). Although HP VUE provided users with an easy-to-use desktop interface, there was no industry standard graphical user interface (GUI) for desktop computer running the UNIX operating classification and the X Window method What this meant was that plane though Motif applications behaved the same across multiple platforms there was no commonality in the graphical user interface, which was referr to as a desktop. This was a serious limitation from the perspective of the two the end user who had to learn to operate different desktops in a heterogeneous computing environment and the application developer who had to disentangle and integrate applications into multiple desktops. This was also a expense factor in enterprises with multivendor computing environments because of the take away froms involved in training users and integrating of recent origin systems into existing heterogeneous networked environments.

Hewlett-Packard has a long-standing commitment to explain system standards. HP is the same of four sponsor companies that contributed guide technologies and helped to exhibit CDE (Common Desktop Environment). CDE's consistent contemplate and feel is based upon HP's proven and accepted HP VUE technology. This rich graphical user interface has become a core constituent of CDE.

Although HP VUE and CDE have the same gaze and feel, the two technologies are somewhat different with the spring being that HP VUE customizations cannot be directly incorporated into the CDE desktop and be reckon uponed to work. HP's commitment to supporting customer investments dictated that a seamless transition from HP VUE to CDE was necessary. steady though a complete transition is not possible in a certain cases, the intent was to make the transition as thorough and effortless as possible.

Developing the Migration Tools

The decision to disentangle a set of tools to allow HP Vue-to-CDE migration was made in the inferior half of 1994. This decision included an agreement between Hewlett-Packard and TriTeal Corporation to cause to grow these tools jointly. TriTeal and HP have a lengthy history with the HP VUE returns because through a licensing agreement with HP TriTeal has marketed and sold HP-VUE in succession AIX, Solaris, SUN, DEC OSF/1 and AT&T GIS operating systems

A customer review was conducted by HP in June 1994 to help determine the user categories greatest in number concerned with migration. 213 customers were randomly reviewed We had a 34% (73 responses) reply rate. Fig. 1 shows the percentage of respondent falling into the various user categories. Respondent were allowed to choice multiple categories. For example, almost all of the respondent were period users, and 65% of them were theory administrators.

The survey listed areas of HP VUE customizations and asked customers to select the areas for which CDE must provide a migration mechanism. Fig. 2 indicates this list and the percentage of respondent choosing various areas for migration.

It was decided early that the migration tools would be a settle of shell scripts, modularized thus that customers could run them to suit their specific necessitys It was also recognized although converter would be written to deal with the used by all kinds of customizations, it would be impossible to cater to all tokens and forms of customization. The tools would be written to be noninvasive and not change any of the HP VUE customizations.

The Difference Between HP VUE and CDE

A brief turn the thoughts at the major differences between HP VUE and CDE will help explain what the various converter written for migration have to accomplish. Converter were written for:

* Actions and file models * Icon image files * Toolboxes * Front-panel and session customizations

Actions and File impressed signs Actions make it easier to hurry applications by representing the applications as icons that can be manipulated. When an action is created, the application is integrated into the user's graphical environment, teaching the desktop in what manner to ran the application.

A file mark (referred to as a data original in CDE) provides the ability for different models of files to have different appearance and behavior. The file-type accomplishes this by:

* Defining a unique icon for the each file in the file manager windows * Providing a custom actions menu for tasks that users do with data files * Providing words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following sensitivity for actions (for example, different versions of the print action can be written for different file tokens creating a file-type-sensitive printer repress for the front panel).

Both HP VUE and CDE use actions and file (data) typing in the same way. one as well as the other maintain a database of actions and file type