Resources for Rolling Your Own Windowing System?

WalterGR asks: "There are plenty of resources available for writing operating systems, e.g. Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, the Dinosaur Book, and countless web sites. For those of us who aren't interested in low-level issues, and prefer focusing on human-computer interaction, what resources are available for designing windowing systems (a la X Window)? Issues like the object hierarchy, event management, modularity, redefining behavior at runtime (e.g. for skins) etc. Any suggestions?"

Comments

OWL, MFC, K, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at the object windowing libraries put out by several vendors. It should give you a good footing on developing your own object hierarchy.

As for not getting into 'low-level' stuff, you're SOL if you want to build an X-like system.

I'm right there.

[Ortado]

I've been working for about 4 years now on a graphical user interface for dos as a pet project, and have learned a great number of things. So many, in fact, that i'm in the middle (still) of rewriting it. If you're intreseted, the website is http://dwin.sf.net/ and is open sourced. When the new version comes out (or the next preview) one could use it to see how it all fits together. This would be better then trying to use XWin to learn how everything works because it is smaller, simplier and very OOP (which is great for windowing systems). And yes, most of /. will call me crazy for reinventing the GUI, but heck, i've learned so much about computers in doing it that it's been a real fun time.

-Jon Gentle(atrodo@atrodo.org)

No really, I'm serious...

[curunir]

Microsoft's Research is pretty good...

These guys spend a lot of effort answering the kind of questions you're asking.

It's a ten line program

[CatherineCornelius]

#include
#include <rants/msvapple.h>
#include <rants/nextstep.h>
#include <slashdot/troll.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
puts("Real programmers use curses");
return 0;
}

Re:Wheel.

[klund]

For more on some of the things wrong with Microsoft's WIMP GUI, see A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts. Specifically, take the following quiz if you're interested in Windowing System Design:

1. Microsoft Toolbars offer the user the option of displaying a label below each tool. Name at least one reason why labeled tools can be accessed faster. (Assume, for this, that the user knows the tool and does not need the label just simply to identify the tool.)
   
   
2. You have a palette of tools in a graphics application that consists of a matrix of 16x16-pixel icons laid out as a 2x8 array that lies along the left-hand edge of the screen. Without moving the array from the left-hand side of the screen or changing the size of the icons, what steps can you take to decrease the time necessary to access the average tool?
   
   
3. A right-handed user is known to be within 10 pixels of the exact center of a large, 1600 X 1200 screen. You will place a single-pixel target on the screen that the user must point to exactly. List the five pixel locations on the screen that the user can access fastest. For extra credit, list them in order from fastest to slowest access.
   
   
4. Microsoft offers a Taskbar which can be oriented along the top, side or bottom of the screen, enabling users to get to hidden windows and applications. This Taskbar may either be hidden or constantly displayed. Describe at least two reasons why the method of triggering an auto-hidden Microsoft Taskbar is grossly inefficient.
   
   
5. Explain why a Macintosh pull-down menu can be accessed at least five times faster than a typical Windows pull-down menu. For extra credit, suggest at least two reasons why Microsoft made such an apparently stupid decision.
   
   
6. What is the bottleneck in hierarchical menus and what technique used on the Macintosh, but not on Windows, makes that bottleneck less of a problem? Can you think of other techniques that could be applied?
   
   
7. Name at least one advantage circular popup menus have over standard, linear popup menus.
   
   
8. What can you do to linear popup menus to better balance access time for all items?
   
   
9. The industrial designers let loose on the iMac not only screwed up the mouse by making it round, they screwed up the keyboard by cutting the command keys in half so the total depth of the keyboard was reduced by half a key. Why was this incredibly stupid?
   
   
10. What do the primary solutions to all these questions have in common?

Plan9

[horster]

go to the plan9 site -
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/
(for starters see this paper on the old plan9 window system) - http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/8%bd/8%bd.html

there is some information there, and the source code for the window system is actually readable because it is much few lines of code and over all simpler than x windows.

also Rob Pike (who worked on plan9) has written several interesting papers on windowing systems.
try reading them by poking around this site - http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/144447.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/pike89concurrent.html
(sorry the actual articles - linked off of the above links are only ps or pdf, no html)

These papers, the plan9 window system as well as the inferno window system prove that a simple, elegant window system can be created that is both fast and runs over a network.

Granted these use some features that don't exist in the unix world (like plan9's threading model, and the use of per process namespaces) but I believe these can be emulated somewhat using standard networking.
The size, complexity and performance of x windows are all indications that it is not the optimal solution.