SunView was introduced as an object-oriented toolkit layer on top of the SunWindows platform to address the increasing complexity of the underlying system and to facilitate the development of user interfaces.

[4] SunView ran on Sun's desktop and deskside workstations, providing an interactive graphical environment for technical computing, document publishing, medical, and other applications of the 1980s, on high resolution monochrome, greyscale and color displays.

The DeskSet tools became a unifying element at the end of the Unix wars, where the open systems industry was embroiled in a battle which would last for years.

The full suite of group productivity applications that Sun had bundled with the desktop workstations turned out to be a significant legacy of SunView.

Sun provided a toolkit for X called XView, with an API similar to that of SunView, simplifying the transition for developers between the two environments.