The Open Group Announces Common Desktop Environment 2.1

New features enhance the functionality and ease of use of the widely used graphical user interface for open desktop computing

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (February 5, 1997) - The Open Group, the leading organization for the advancement of open systems, today announced the release of CDE 2.1, the latest version of The Open Group's Common Desktop Environment. The current release integrates the Motif 2.0 graphical user interface, X Window System, and CDE to standardize application presentations in distributed multi-platform environments.

"As a result of solid cooperation among project participants, we are delivering significant new features which makes CDE and Motif a unified face for UNIX environments," said Dave Lounsbury, vice president of collaborative development. "The CDE 2.1 project was the most extensive collaborative development effort in the history of The Open Group."

The latest release of CDE features enhanced tools for creating integrated graphical desktop applications. New features include thread-safe libraries, 64-bit system support, an X-based printing solution that implements a standard way of printing from any application, an enhanced, SGML-based on-line help system with a complete documentation set, "on the spot" input, and user-defined characters for Asian languages. Many capabilities have been added to ease programming, including traits, which enable user interface objects to automatically inherit multiple API specifications, and a uniform transfer model, which offer developers a consistent means of coding the different data-transfer mechanisms (such as cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop). The new release also provides a simple means of coding pop-up windows.

CDE 2.1 also incorporates Motif 2.0 user interface objects (widgets) spin box, combo box, container, and notebook. With this release, the style guides for CDE and Motif converge.

The fee for a CDE 2.1 full-distribution source code license is $40,000. An evaluation copy of source code costs $5,000. To order CDE 2.1, contact our sales offices.

Introduced in 1995, CDE was jointly developed and licensed by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, and SunSoft. Since that time, the technology has evolved within The Open Group's Pre-Structured Technology (PST) process, a multi-vendor technology development program. Currently, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Digital Equipment Corporation and SCO work with the original CDE sponsors, IBM, HP and SunSoft within the Open Group's PST framework, to provide for the maintenance of CDE and the development of new releases.

The Common Desktop Environment is a graphical user interface that delivers consistency and ease of use to system administrators as well as end users. With CDE, system administrators gain a degree of control over the desktop computing environment that has often been lost in the move from centralized to client-server or distributed computing. CDE gives end users access to the power and flexibility of today's networked desktop systems.

The Open Group Dedicated to the advancement of multi-vendor information systems, The Open Group is an international consortium of systems and software vendors and customers from the industry, government and academia. The Open Group and its members work together to strengthen and streamline the development process and availability of open systems. The organization provides a focal point for the development of international specifications and test suites, standards based technologies, advanced open systems research, professional services and the management of the internationally recognized brand for open systems. The Open Group's brand mark is recognized worldwide and is a guarantee of compliance to open systems specifications. The Open Group is Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with European headquarters in Reading, England and offices in Menlo Park, CA; Washington, DC; Brussels, Belgium; Grenoble, France; and Tokyo, Japan.

The Open Group is a trademark of the Open Software Foundation, Inc. and X/Open Company Ltd. OSF/Motif and Motif are registered trademarks of The Open Group. X Window System is a trademark of The Open Group and the X Consortium is a trademark of The Open Group. UNIX is a registered trademark in the US and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Ltd. All other products or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners.

CONTACT
Jane Smeloff
The Open Group
(617) 621-8997
j.smeloff@opengroup.org
URL:http://www.opengroup.org