Athena: A Fast Kernel-Independent GUI OS

Per Wigren writes: "I just found out about Athena OS which got me really amazed. It's a 100% OO, kernel-independent GUI OS with an XML-based scriptinglanguage called DML that allows the user to edit the OS itself, as well as creating simple applications and extensive GUI interfaces! It's extremely fast! It started an Amiga Workbench-clone desktop with draggable screens in less than 2 seconds... Download is less than 1M ... I honestly think Athena has potential to obsolete both Gnome and KDE ..." Take note of these words from the FAQ regarding Athena's terms: "[O]pen source may be something of a misnomer from a purist's point of view. Linux users should note that Pandora has nothing to do with the GPL or any other public licensing scheme."

Comments

OK, this is just crap

[the red pen]

I was suffering from insomnia, so I read the DML whitepaper. Now I'm suffering from nausea as well.

Have you ever seen one of those situations where someone takes a smattering of technical knowledge and industriously recreates something that already exists... but does it badly? (If you haven't seen this, Microsoft has a whole catalog of products to illustrate this point.)

There is so much cluelessness on the Athena OS site, it's really hard to figure out where to start, but getting down to the core technology: DML is stupid. DML is the "Object Oriented GUI language in XML." Buzzword compliant? You bet? Useful? Not!

XML is a rotten format for programming languages. Anyone who's worked with XSLT knows what I mean. XSLT (related to XSL) is, essentially, a programming language that converts XML documents into other XML documents and XSLT itself is (drum roll please) an XML document. Why? 'Cause XML documents are sooooo late 90's -- and in the late 90's, you could sell shit-on-a-stick if it was XML-compliant. If you've ever seen an XSLT program/document that did anything vaguely complex, you immediately think, "Fuck! I could do this in 10 lines of..." Perl? PHP? Java? Visual Basic? All of the above! There is no language that is not preferable to XSLT.

The idea that spawed XSL/XSLT was that in "the future", browsers wouldn't download HTML, they'd download XML documents, and an associated XSL document would turn it into something displayable on the client side. God forbid a Perl, Java, PHP, or ASP program on the server do this for you -- no, let's make the thin client fat again, by giving it the responsibility of not only rendering, but organizing the data. Proof positive that this was a dumb idea what that Internet Explorer 5.0 proudly featured a robust implementation of this idiocy.

So, already, we have the case that anyone who isn't laboring under the deficits inflicted by a head injury has figured out that you really don't want to force any kind of programming language to look like a valid XML document. So what is the big deal with "Athena OS"? Oh, it's a programming language that is XML-compliant. How clever.

This "XML-compliant" programming language causes you to do really weird things architecturally. If you read the whitepaper, you will see an example where they make a widget resizable by attaching "resize" objects to it. "resize" is an object?! Diagram that, UML-mongers!

Piled on top of basic Bad Technology(tm), are numerous statements that indicate that these guys have never looked at any other system. Their claims about the flexibility of their design are laughable to anyone who has seen Motif widget management or Java AWT LayoutManagers (GridBagLayout is a bear, but it's incredibly powerful). Seriously, they try to sound like they've invented a better mousetrap, but you start to wonder if they've ever seen a real mouse. Like, where did they get this gem:

• XML and HTML standards are defined by their respective organisations and have no direct association with Rocklyte Systems or the DML standard.

It's like they don't even know where HTML and XML come from... but whereever they're from, it's not Rocklyte Systems and we want to remind you of that. This is just laugh-out-loud funny.

Cross-platform-o-rama!

[the red pen]

Object Oriented! Well-documented core APIs available on all platforms! Runtime loading of objects! Closed source to "protect its integrity"! It's... it's...

• Java

...but six years too late and not nearly as good.

it's a window manager

[eMBee]

since this thing not only requires linux and X11, i don't see how this is more than a fancy xml-programmable window manager.
it may become more in the future. but calling a window manager an OS is a major exaggeration.
for it to be an OS it would need to allow me to log into it, and create an environment where i can run programs without them being aware that they are actually on a different system (the linux host).
i have seen nothing of that in the description.

greetings, eMBee.
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