Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mstar!mstar.morningstar.com!bob From: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: comp.windows.news Subject: Re: Window systems should not be substitutes for decent environments Message-ID: Date: 12 Jan 90 15:49:10 GMT References: <13337@granite.BBN.COM> <4458@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <8912162135.AA03025@iris.rand.org> <4290@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <4392@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <2405@bacchus.dec.com> <14286@jumbo.dec.com> Sender: news@MorningStar.COM (USENET Administrator) Reply-To: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Organization: Morning Star Technologies Lines: 35 In-reply-to: msm@src.dec.COM's message of 11 Jan 90 20:13:44 GMT In article <14286@jumbo.dec.com> msm@src.dec.COM (Mark S. Manasse) writes: In article <13337@granite.BBN.COM>, mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) writes: [T]he X11 protocol simply does not allow me, as an application writer, to decide what parts of my application belong close to the user (in the server, where they can provide fast feedback, etc.) and what parts belong in the client... You, as an application writer, are free to decide what part of your application belongs close to the user. You, as an application writer, can then write two programs, communicating by whatever means you choose, one of which is generally intended to execute on the same machine as your X server, bringing it about as close as is interesting. Here we see two different ideas of "close". NeWS programmers consider "running on the same machine" not to be necessarily close enough, and consider "running in the server itself" to be interesting enough to make a difference. Proximity, in this case, can be considered in terms of address space and scheduler slots in the server host's native OS, rather than geographically or net-topologically. A PostScript lightweight process is subject to the NeWS server's scheduler and uses the server's internal inter(lightweight)process communications facilities. Everyone agrees, in this day and age, that (at least part of) a window client must be able to run in a different address space than its window server, and must be able to communicate via the inter-process communication facilities provided by the underlying OS. And so long as there's (in UNIX terms) a process division, the two might just as well be running on entirely different hosts. That's the foundation of a network-distributed window system. A difference between the X and NeWS philosophies lies in whether that separate address space is a requirement or an option.