Xref: utzoo comp.windows.news:1769 comp.windows.x:16248 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!think!bbn!diamond.bbn.com!mlandau From: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) Newsgroups: comp.windows.news,comp.windows.x Subject: Re: Is SUN a "PURE PLAYER" in window systems - SunView or OpenWindows??? Message-ID: <13323@diamond.BBN.COM> Date: 31 Dec 89 02:05:47 GMT References: <8912302010.AA11723@super.super.org> Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation, Cambridge, MA Lines: 84 lerici@SUPER.ORG (Peter W. Brewer) writes: >Could it be that Sun is still >trying to make something as good as the Apollo Display Manager .. a network >windowing system based on the client server model? No, they've already made something *better* than either X11 or the Apollo Display Manager: a network window system based on the client/server model where the imaging model in the server is *useful*, and helps rather than hinders someone who wants to write an application that has non-trivial display requirements. The place where Sun botched it was in not doing a "sample implementation" of NeWS and making it publicly available in the same way that the "sample implementation" of X11 is freely available. If they had, X would have died off by now, because NeWS is simply a technically superior idea. For the life of me, I still can't understand how anyone involved in the early design phases of X11 thought that a resolution-dependent imaging model based on rectangular arrays of pixels was a good idea, when the groundwork had already been laid for using a page description langauge as the basis of the imaging model in other systems. Was no one familiar with the history of SunDEW, for example? >I think some of the >toolkits coming out for X have alot of promise.. they are also for the most >part still basically public domain freeware. Tell that to OSF -- Motif, which is (alas!) likely to become the dominant X11 toolkit, is considered proprietary software with source code license fees, royalty payments due by software vendors who ship Motif binaries, etc. That's an interesting contrast to Sun -- historically considered the "bad guys" of the window system world for not making NeWS free -- which has finally seen the light and made the XView toolkit freely available to anyone, for any purpose. >In terms of extensibility they all have their good and bad sides. The point is not about toolkits, although personally I don't find any of the existing toolkits terribly worthwhile from the point of view of extensibility. (Writing new widgets, for instance, is considerably more difficult than it needs to be. InterViews might be an exception to the rule that toolkits are hard to extend -- writing in C++ buys you a lot a priori -- but I haven't had a chance to work much with InterViews.) The real point is that X11 is fundamentally flawed by virtue of not providing extensible window *server*. There's no way for an application at runtime to change the characteristics of the server, add new facilities to it, etc. If you look even cursorily at what you can do by downloading PostScript code into the X11/NeWS server, and at the contortions you have to go through to achieve the same thing in X, it should be obvious why a runtime-extensible server is The Right Thing. No, Display PostScript doesn't count. It only allows you to image stuff, not to extend the input handling characteristics of the server the way you can in X11/NeWS. It's also by no means universal, and if you can't count on a facility being in the server, then it might as well not be there. The so-called "extensibility" of the X11 protocol also doesn't count. You have to recompile the server to make extensions. As a software vendor, I shouldn't have to be in the business of writing modified window servers in order to write the kind of applications I want to write. >If NeWS is to find some niche it would >be better off not knocking X but joining with it and enhancing it. Xnews is >a poor attempt at this.. I do not think all of that stuff belongs in the >server. I'd be interested in knowing exactly what you think is wrong with X11/NeWS. Personally, the idea of a single server based on a reasonable imaging model that interprets both X11 and NeWS protocol requests seems like the most elegant way to provide the X11 compatibility that the market demands without sacrificing the inherently superior characteristics of NeWS. (Don't get me wrong -- there are some things wrong with X11/NeWS. One is that it runs too slowly and uses too much memory, but that can be fixed if Sun gets on the ball technically. Another is that making "point" == "pixel" in NeWS PostScript was just stupid -- granted you can't discover automatically the resolution of your display device, since the hardware doesn't tell you, but you could at least provide command line flags or environment variables read by the server that would let the *user* tell you what the resolution is. Maybe in OpenWindows 1.1??) -- Matt Landau mlandau@bbn.com Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.