XVT provides common representation of events, windows, fonts, graphics, and many other GUI features.  Instead of calling the functions available on the native window system, the application makes calls to the XVT Universal API Library. The XVT API's then call the native API. 

The XVT interface is identical on each window system that we support.  Because the XVT interface is an abstraction of existing programming interfaces, it is easy use, but it still provides similar functionality to that available in the native window systems. 

To build an application with XVT, a programmer writes his own source code and resources making calls to the XVT software. The implementation of the XVT software calls native windowing system functions. This source is compiled and linked with XVT libraries as well as native GUI libraries.  To port, the developer moves his source code and resource files to a new platform, recompiles, and links with the XVT and native libraries for that platform.

Porting XVT Applications: Write Once, Build Everywhere 

XVT developed source code is platform independent. The port of an XVT application is simply a matter of moving all source files (C or C++), header files, resource files and help files to the target platform, recompile the C/C++ files with a native C/C++ compiler (almost all current compilers are supported by XVT), recompile the resource file using XVT curl compiler into a native resource file, compile the native resource file with the native resource compiler (not provided by XVT, either by compiler manufacture on PCs, or by native toolkit libraries for Motif), and link the object files using the native linker.

 XVT front end tools work on portable binary projects that you can move from platform to platform. With XVT, identical application source code runs on all platforms and looks native on each.  Rather than rewriting an entire application from scratch for each new windowing environment, developers can create and maintain one set of source code and address multiple environments.  For this reason, XVT offers a tremendous savings in development time and costs.  

XVT applications obey appropriate user interface guidelines for each system.  It is transparent to the end user that XVT was used in development; XVT applications appear and act as if they were coded specifically for the particular window system.