Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: NeWS/X11 merge?
Keywords: xnews NeWS X11
Message-ID: <2490@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 23 Sep 89 22:39:04 GMT
References: <445@castle.ed.ac.uk> <563@ssgp32.UU.NET>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 91

>Does the OpenLook GUI sit on top of an X11/News server?

It can.  Three implementations of OPEN LOOK toolkits either exist or are
under development, that I know of.  Two run atop X11, and thus can
presumably run atop X11/NeWS, as well as vanilla X11 - AT&T's "XT+" or
whatever it's called, which is a set of X Toolkit widgets, and Sun's
XView, which has a SunView-like programmatic interface (or, to use the
official TLA for those, API).  One runs atop NeWS, or possibly only atop
the flavor of NeWS implemented in X11/NeWS (I don't know if it runs atop
earlier implementations) - Sun's NDE.  XView should appear in source
form in X11R4 - an alpha version has already been made generally
available in source form.  I can't speak for the availability of the
others, either in source or binary form. 

There also appear to be three OPEN LOOK window managers in existence or
under development, as I remember - one X11-only one done by AT&T, one
X11-only one done by Sun which will be available in X11R4 in source form
(and which is also available in source form along with XView), and one
that is NeWS PostScript(R)-or-whatever-Adobe's-lawyers-would-insist-on-
calling-it-given-that-it's-not-based-on-their-implementation running in
the server which can presumably manage both X11 and NeWS windows.

>Where does SunView fit (below, above, beside)?

SunView programs can, I think, share the screen, keyboard, and mouse
with the X11/NeWS server; I think the server looks to them like a
replacement for the "sunview" program - i.e., manager of the root
window.  This is a SunOS-specific hack for binary compatibility.  The
intent, as far as I know, is to replace the SunView tookit with the
XView toolkit, which runs atop X11 and should thus be more portable.

>Can I still pixrect?

If that means "can I still bang on the raw frame buffer", you can still
do so to the extent that SunView programs can do so, but you probably
don't want to, in general, unless you don't want to have your program
run on anything other that Suns.

If that means "what do I do about programs that use e.g. memory
pixrects", I'll quote a message from one of the XView developers, posted
to "comp.windows.x":

   XView itself does not support operations on memory pixrects, though you 
   can use the Sun pixrect library in conjunction with XView. However, this
   construct is not portable, since only Suns have the pixrect library.
   If you're concerned with portability, I would suggest using server
   images instead of memory pixrects.

>Will Motif operate on top of this combined thingy?

Ultimately, I presume it will; I suspect the main problems would have to
do with the version of X11 upon which the X11 part is based - R2, R3, or
whatever.  I would expect it to ultimately match R4, but if it currently
isn't R3-compatible in ways that break Motif, it may have problems; I
have no idea whether it is sufficently R3-compatible to support Motif or
not.

>Does it perform well on anything less than a SPARC?

I've heard claims from Sun people that it is in some ways faster than
the MIT server; I assume they're referring to bit-bashing speed.  "Well"
depends on the observer, ultimately; SunView runs on my 4MB 3/50 fast
enough that I consider it usable, but I liked it better on a 32MB
4/280....

>Will the X11 implementation support remote X11 clients (e.g., peecees)?

	-I've got a slug.

	-Can it talk?

	-No.

	-Well, then it's hardly a proper replacement, then!

		--M. Python's Flying Circus, Dead Parrot sketch

If an X11 implementation doesn't support remote clients on a system that
supports the appropriate network connection, I'd hardly consider it a
proper X11 implementation.  As far as I know, the X11/NeWS X11
implementation supports them the same way any other X11 implementation
would.  (But you say "peecees" - do you mean remote *clients* or remote
*servers*?  Are there PCs running as X11 *clients* - i.e., doing their
displaying on some screen *other* than the one to which they're directly
attached?)

>How is it all organized?

In what way?  Robin Schaufler has given a paper on the way it was
implemented, which I think appeared in some USENIX proceedings in the
past few years.)