Re: OFFTOPIC: GGI and alternative GUIs and windowing systems in Linux -LONG
Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.CSIRO.AU)
Sun, 25 Jan 1998 21:13:28 +1100
Perry Harrington writes:
> My solution is to move the object management code into the client (display),
> and only consult the application when an interactive event deems neccessary.
>
> The way that this is achieved, is to make an X like windowing system (the 7?
> core resources are managed similarly as objects) with a base level UI drawing
> library resident in the display server. Each UI object would have a number
> of "default" handlers for various events. Each window and object would retain
> the event mask architecture, this is a Good Thing(tm) that MS fundamentally
> ignores (can you believe that they go through the whole rigamarole of passing
> a message to a window that's just going to discard it?), and would be created
> with default handlers. The default handlers (updating a list box when the
> scroll bar is moved for instance) could provide most of the logic in 90% of
> all programs, thus reducing the number of events generated to the program,
> and making UI response faster, network bandwidth usage lower, and the UI a
> unified, design.
Well, interesting idea. Good luck on getting it accepted:-) I'd be
interested in seeing numbers which show just how much network traffic
could be saved by your approach. You could measure this by hacking Xt
to log all transactions with the X server.
And does this traffic really matter with modern networks?
If you want to improve your chances on getting this accepted,
implementing it as an extension to X would help.
One point that I'm not clear on, but seemed to be hinted at in a
previous message, is whether you see this fatter display server as
part of the OS (i.e. the kernel) or not. I hope that you don't
actually propose that such a server be part of the kernel.
Another point to consider is that the current split between X client
and server allows work to be shared between the two. If you have an
SMP machine, there is an easy parallelism win. Having a fat display
server means it has to be threaded, which is a lot of work.
Regards,
Richard....