Introducing the WinaXe Plus X Development Kit

The WinaXe Plus X Development Kit (XDK) is a software development package designed to allow software developers to design and port existing X Window applications from UNIX, Linux or VMS systems to the Microsoft Windows PC platform.

The WinaXe Plus XDK is the X Development Kit, i.e. it is the software development environment to create X applications (or X clients). The WinaXe Plus XDK provides possibility to compile and link X clients by using Microsoft Visual C++ Studio (Version 6.0). A ported X application is a Win32 executable. You can run it under MS Windows (within the run-time X environment, which is another part of the WinaXe Plus XDK).

Local X support provided permits X clients to be started and/or displayed locally or remotely on available X servers in the network. A ported X application uses an X server on an MS Windows machine just like any other UNIX X client communicates with an X server for displaying the windows.

In order to develop X clients, you must have programming knowledge of Microsoft Windows 9x/ME/NT4/2000/XP and the X Window System. This chapter assumes that you have the necessary programming expertise.

About the WinaXe Plus XDK

The WinaXe Plus XDK is a set of various .DLLs, include-files, and libraries (i.e., all the X Window System standard libraries and toolkits) that you can use to develop GUI or console X client applications that run on your PC under MS Windows instead of a UNIX or Linux host. You can develop a local X client from scratch using the XDK, or you can port the code of an existing UNIX or Linux X application and rebuild the project so that the application runs locally (i.e. on a PC under MS Windows).

The WinaXe Plus XDK also includes Motif libraries and include-files for developing local Motif clients. Local Motif clients are clients that use the current implementation of the OSF/Motif Widget set and are built to run on your PC under MS Windows instead of a UNIX host.

The current version of the WinaXe Plus XDK supports X11R6.6 and Motif 2.2.2.

The WinaXe Plus XDK provides support for X-Clients that use the GLX extension. The corresponding ".h" and ".lib" files are added to the XDK file set. The WinaXe Plus XDK also includes four sample GLX X-Clients (as MS VC 6.0 projects with sources).

To create a local X client application, you can use the contents of the WinaXe Plus XDK in conjunction with the Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 application development tool.

Installing the WinaXe Plus XDK

You can install the WinaXe Plus XDK by choosing its item in the Custom Setup Type (see section Running Setup in chapter Installing WinaXe Plus). As a result, the directory and file structures described below will get created.