Using SPARCworks Visual
(or, "Visual Basic for Unix")
Introduction
There are many ways to write applications that provide a Graphical User
Interface in a UNIX environment, all of which involve programming the X
Window system in one way or another. SPARCworks Visual provides a
graphical way to do this on Solaris systems. There is a very good
tutorial that will walk you through the development of a moderately
complex user interface. This page describes how to run the
tutorial and the visu program.
Running the Anwerbook Navigator and Viewer
The tutorial comes as a PostScript book with embedded hypertext links.
It could be printed out, but the best way to read it is online using a
program called answerbook. To use answerbook you must be using
one of the SPARC workstations in the lab. The last time I tried, it did
not work on the Network Computers (nc5, etc.), only on the "cat"
machines. The issue is the need to support "Display Postscript" for
drawing on the screen. Note that this requirement applies to running
the tutorial, but not to running SPARCworks Visual, which will
run on any computer running an X Window server, including the nc
machines.
Type answerbook on a command line, and the "AnswerBook
Navigator" will come up on the screen after doing some housekeeping to
see what AnswerBooks are installed on your computer. The navigator has
a list of the AnswerBooks in the bottom panel. Scroll down until you
come to the one for SPARCworks/Visual1.1 and double click on it. The
top panel will now give you the table of contents for the book. You
can start reading the book from the beginning, or you can skip directly
to Chapter 2, where the tutorial starts. Click on anything in the top
panel of the navigator, and a big "AnswerBook Viewer" window will show up
with one page of the book displayed. Click on the forward and back
arrows at the top right of the Viewer to change pages, or click on the
hypertext links, which show up as boxes around text or page numbers.
While you read the tutorial, you will want to have SPARCworks Visual
running so you can do the exercises in the tutorial. Read on...
Running SPARCworks Visual
Type visu on the command line.
Troubleshooting
The DISPLAY environment variable must be set to an X Window host that
supports Display Postscript, such as the cat machines in the lab in
order to run answerbook. You should be sitting in front of that
host computer.
If the AnswerBook Navigator comes up but doesn't include
SPARCworks/Visual1.1, tell a systems administrator that the answerbook
installation isn't correct on the computer you are using.
The VISUROOT environment variable should be set to
/opt/SUNWspro/visu1.1.
The directory /opt/SUNWspro/bin must be in your PATH.
Christopher Vickery
Computer Science Department
Queens College of CUNY