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Fresco M1 Released
rajan r writes "The first release after 18 months, Fresco, previously known as Berlin, released M1 or Milestone 1. The release notes here, screenshots here. The original 'press release' follows: 'I'm proud to announce that milestone 1 of Fresco (formerly known as Berlin) has (at long last) been released. A lot has changed since the last release, but this isn't that surprising, since the last release was more then 18 months ago; most of the real work for the past few months has been behind the scenes (changing hosts, a new web site infrastructure, improved build system, an issue tracker (hooray!), better documentation (and more to come), etc.). Source (no packages at the moment, but debs will be available soon, and the tree contains .spec files for building your own rpms) The name change. Enjoy! -- Nathaniel '"
Okay, how about Berlin? Still doesn't ring a bell? You mean that you don't know about this obscure package referenced only by unknown product names that the unbelievable overwhelming majority of the public has no knowledge about? Good then, we won't bother including a simple description of what the hell it even is.
P.S. It's a system for tracking calories from consumed donuts.
I'm wondering why they changed their name from Berlin to Fresco. Why was it called Berlin in the first place, and what made them decide to change it? Kitchener, Canada used to be called Berlin prior to around 1910 or so. Why is everyone dissing Berlin?
I had some early failures trying to get Berlin up and running on my system -- just compiling the (highly unstable) prereqs was a chore, let alone having to upgrade my compiler to compile Berlin. I hope this time around it doesn't take me a week to even "try" it, because I've been a steady believer in the project (well... any project to replace X).
MORTAR COMBAT!
If you're like me and have no idea what Fresco does, check out the intro, an FAQ and FrescoVsX. I was reading about this project last night, and since Slashdot doesn't really explain what everything is, these provide some answers.
,
faeryman
Debian packages are available from http://non-us.debian.org/~waldi/ . Note that the fresco packages require the omniorb4 packages.
(Okay, actually I think CORBA is gross, period.)
-Kevin
I had a lot of trouble compiling on FreeBSD, but that was quite some time ago. Maybe they've fixed some of their dependency and compiling problems?
MORTAR COMBAT!
personally, i'm waiting for the graphical server previously known as prince.
Really, half a sentence of what this Fresco is about would have been helpful in the introduction - e.g. "Fresco is a windowing system derived from a powerful structured graphics toolkit" (from the page). This would save readers not familiar with the project from having to click on the article to find out whether it interests them, and it would reduce the slashdot effect a bit.
I know, it's a novel concept, an introduction actually introducing the readers to the subject...
Stupidity is mis-underestimated.
Network transparency is the only thing X has going for it. In fact, it's the only thing I miss on my Mac. DPS can do it on my NeXT and X can do it in Linux, I wish Apple would implement something like xhosting or NXHosting in Quartz.
Some comments on other comments that are bound to pop up:
/. experiences I know that these misunderstandingfs/questions are bound to crop up.
*) Yes Fresco uses CORBA and it is a good thing. It gives network transparency and language transparency for free. Yes, we know it is slower then using raw sockets, but CORBA is the only thing available powerful enough for our needs. It's not bloat if you need the features;-)
*) Fresco is not X: Yes, we do not extend X. X is good, we do think so too, but it has certain shortcommings we do want to adress. Improving X is not an option: We'd need to carry along tons of code we do not need and blow the code size out of proportion (example: xlib, networking code).
*) Fresco is not x compatible now. Support for that can and will be added later. Options for that are manigfold, See our FAQ for more infos on this topic. Again: we do not see that extending X is a good idea: Extending X will result in apps using that extension not being able to run on the unextended X. Fresco apps don't do so either. Both, an extended X and a Fresco with compatibility layer can run X apps. NO, there is no compatibility layer yet.
*) We do not write drivers. We can use whichever drivers are supported by our rendering backends. That's a surprising lot. You can run Fresco in a window in X, using your XFree-driver too.
*) Fresco is device independent. So changing the screen resolution will not make windows smaller and you can print everything you can display on screen. That's a good thing (if you want your windows to become smaller you adjust their zoom factor).
*) No, Fresco is not about rotating windows. We can rotate windows, we do so in our screenshots. That's basically because making windows not rotateable would require us to write code to prevent it! And it's an eye catcher.
*) No, this is in no way ready for the end user. Developers are welcome.
That's the basic things I want to get straight early on. From earlier
Regards,
Tobias
Regards, Tobias
The only thing holding back Linux from World Domination is X's suckiness and slowness.
:P
No, it isn't the "only thing holding back Linux" at all. There are many things holding Linux back from this (dubious) goal and X just isn't one of them
CTWT: 'Cause They Want To.
Can be changed to work better in first person...
CIWT: 'Cause I Want To.
Maybe I'll try it on my girlfriend next time she "has a headache."
-kentyman
You know where you are? You're in the $PATH, baby. You're gonna get executed!
I hope it is can be the replacement to X that most of us have been waiting for,
for benifit of people not familiar with fresco:
they have moved the window manager and the toolkit portion to server thus achieving (hopefully) consistant look and feel , they use corba heavily and i guess it has some replacement of X protocol , but i have not been able to find from their site.
~561
Transparency is also a big part of anti-aliased text. Some people like that.
Spinning window thingies isn't so important, but it shows the flexibility of Fresco. Although a window at a 45 degree turn isn't easy to use there's talk of using something like that to grab user attention. When an application needs your input rather than flashing on the toolbar or taking focus it could appear for a few seconds slightly transparent and rotating slowly - you know, like out of the Exorcist. Features like that are what's bring ing Hollywood to Linux, and I for one welcome it.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
I have watched the Berlin project for several years, remembering the initial idea to create a graphical system written in Assembler, a change of project leaders and the decision to use CORBA.
I don't think that Fresco will replace X anytime soon, if ever, but it's an interesting technology demo that will surely influence other projects. Playing around with the Quartz technology in MacOS X has convinced me that better and more interesting ways of doing graphics are possible - the Fresco project, by using device independent rendering (OpenGL / Postscript) and an ORB merges some of the advantages of X and DPS / Display PDF.
Fresco consists of a number of interlocking projects, each named after an city (Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Babylon). The "Berlin" program was the window server, as well as the entire project. To avoid confusion, the project name was changed to "Fresco". The window server is still called "Berlin".
And some of the screenshots are treble, like this one
That "screenshot" is not a screenshot of Fresco. It's a screenshot of gv displaying postscript generated by a very early version of the Postscript DrawingKit -- in effect demonstrating that Fresco can now print.
it offers WidgetKits which do exactly that - but graphical design is something we currently avoid, rather straighten out the API first
:)
of course you're free to build a better looking one
This was obviously meant in the way that Hollywood computers (ie. films in movies) have overly fancy and unrealistic interfaces and bringing some of those pure eyecandy features to the Linux desktop. Way to *totally* miss the point.
sig.
IF X were as good as Quartz Extreme then Linux would succeed on the desktop.
X is what is holding linux back, not lack of apps, you see people complain linux is too hard to use, and it cant be made easier until X is fixed.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
In an earlier comment somebody said, "Fresco is not X: Yes, we do not extend X. X is good, we do think so too, but it has certain shortcommings we do want to adress. Improving X is not an option: We'd need to carry along tons of code we do not need and blow the code size out of proportion (example: xlib, networking code)."
X may be good but sometimes it is simply too slow and, worse, the documentation does not go out of its way to explain properly the speedups that are available.
Ok, there's shared memory pixmaps and shared memory images but the documentation is incomplete.
When you need speed and don't care about hardware-dependency you can use Direct Graphics Access module - DGA. But where's good documentation for DGA? Is there anything faster than DGA in X? Where's the good documentation?
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
there is many problems with X that hopefully Fresco or any other X replacement will solve, for example in windows,MacOS,BeOS, and I think QNX if you install the latest Divx codec all apps will be able to use them, also things like cut and paste that X doesn't handle, for example you cant transparently copy images or formated Text, KDE does a OK job but you still cant cut and paste very well to non kde apps. Lack of a built in window manager is also a pain as even the most basic one adds lots of overhead to X
I bet Fresco will be finished before Xrender has image transformations, true hardware alpha channel, etc.
X is just now getting anti alaised fonts and everyone is saying X is so great, we are about a year away from the release of Xfree5.0 which is supposed to have the finished Xrender, only one guy is working on Xrender (Keith Packard)
The founder of the X project Mr. Dawes claims they are just now beginning to focus on
Quotes from David Dawes David Dawes: There has been some work on a new rendering model for XFree86 that provides some more advance composition techniques (including transparency), this currently being implemented in software. For XFree86 5.0 we'll be investigating this as part of our review of rendering models, and seeing if a hardware implementation would not be more appropriate.
Currently Xrender is still in the planning stages, its at about the same level as Fresco, not really useable to anyone but perhaps Keith Packard and a select few developers, its unfinished, its beta but to users and not so skilled programmers its vaporware.
I'm looking towards XFree86 5.0, which will be the next significant step in XFree86. We're only just starting to think seriously about it. We'll start by re-evaluating what we would like from a graphics/windowing system, and not limit ourselves to the ones that currently exist. With XFree86 4.0 our main focus was on the device-dependent component of the X server (DDX), and to do that we needed to provide a more modular infrastructure. The features that came out of that process showed how much it was needed, and it has given us a solid DDX base from which to expand into other areas. For 5.0 I expect that we'll move more into the device-independent (DIX) and protocol areas as well as making some adjustments to the DDX area based on our experiences with 4.x.
Ok so for Xfree86 5.0 they will focus on improving the rendering, and bringing X to the levels of Aqua, but by the time 5.0 gets here expect Longhorn to be released, and expect OS 11 to be released by Apple which takes things to the next level.
Linux needs to do more than just keep afloat and compete, Linux has to dominate to beat Microsoft.
Currently the only thing preventing Linux from taking the desktop market, is the fact that the currently Linux interface doesnt look polished enough, theres enough programs for grandma, theres games, theres plenty of office apps, the casual user can use Linux, the only reason they wont use Linux is because OSX is better than Linux.
Why buy a Linux dell laptop for college when you can get an Ibook thats just as powerful but better?
Why get Linux if its just like Windows? This is why Windows users would sooner switch to Mac.
X is now one of Linux's biggest bottlenecks, along with the fact that they have no music apps and not enough file sharing apps.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Everyone is saying,
1. "Why?"
2. "What's wrong with X?"
3. "It looks like crap."
Nobody realizes the answers are easy.
1. Why not? They want a better, simpler windowing environment.
2. Read the page. There are performance issues, resolution issues, and network issues. They also hope to add an X compatibilty layer at some point.
3. It's not done, not by a longshot.
Frankly, a rival project is a good thing. Good luck to Fresco for doing something that no one else dares, writing what could turn in to an X substitue.
I wish there was some there was some way that I could be outside playing basketball, in the rain, and not get wet.
CORBA could be faster I guess. For one thing it encodes everything it sends out over the wire as text messages... nice to debug but not really mashine friendly. Then CORBA does a lot more then simply passing a message. It handles all those nasty details you have to keep an eye on in a distributed, heterogenious world. It would definitly be a lot simpler if it could just assume all mashines to have the same character encoding, endianess, ... like Cplant obviously can.
Fortunately CORBA can leave out a lot of the overhead in the 'local case' when communicationg with objects on the same mashine or even in the same address space.
Regards, Tobias
Nonsense. The orignal poster was referring to the supposed suckyness of the X protocol and design. While it does have its drawbacks and disadvantages, they have precisely nothing to do with the usability and user friendlyness of the Linux desktop. You can build a really great app on top of X - Mozilla for instance - or you can build a real bitch of one that your average Mac or Windows user wouldn't have a clue about, e.g. XEmacs.
What will be (and already is) making Linux suceed on the desktop is a friendly desktop environment, such as KDE. The underlying windowing system that it uses to draw on the screen is largely irrelevant.
X is not getting in the way of the Linux desktop succeeding. It has all the important features now: font antialiasing, video, on the fly resolution switching, several great looking toolkits to choose from, and the network transparency is just a bonus. In fact I'd find it pretty hard to work without it.
Can X do image transformation?
What about resolution issues? Font problems anyone?
No realtime shadows, no hardware alpha channel, software alpha channel is too slow and buggy to be useful.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
It would be nice if the slashdot editors would ensure that the slashdot blurbs convey - even generally - what a given project is about. From the slashdot blurb on this, I have no way of telling what "Fresco" is without reading the article. I'm supposing it's a software product (though it might be hardware). I have little idea whether it's a lightweight linux distro, a financial planning application, or a virtual porn site. I don't know if it's free or commercial. I *could* click the article and read it to find out. But I won't, because I'm not that intrigued by a product that I have no knowledge of; there are tons of those.
.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
When you're developing software, having "transparent spinny" thingies is part of testing what you're trying to accomplish. But you probably wouldn't realize that.
The point of Fresco is very similar to the point of Quartz on MacOS X. It's a composited windowing system that doesn't "fake" sophisticated rendering like X currently does. Translucent windows now work by taking a "screenshot" of the area occluded by the window, then adding the color values together. This is a hack. A composited render draws things from back to front, taking into account a Z axis position and the alpha bits in a color block (RGBA) (this is fairly layman, but gets my point across).
I don't know why you're considered insightful for this, but rest-assured, we need a project like Fresco to develop a better windowing system. In the future, computer displays aren't going to be treated as fixed-pixel dimentions with static elements. A computer screen will be like a piece of paper. Elements will be drawn by real-world measurements (x centimeters versus x pixels) such that the number of "dots" will become arbitrary. Things will have to rotate freely. Alpha-blending will be absolutely necessary for proper hinting. And so on and so forth.
X11 is great, but very arcaic. It must go away in the future. Apple's got a good lead -- and pretty soon Microsoft will duplicate their efforts. We've got to be in that game too.
Why bother.
Surely there are deeper issues with a Vector based display that is resolution independant... The rest of the computing world does not use this approach, so how do you remain compatible?
I am not talking about software applications here, but everyday things like webpages (images in a web page are not generally resolution independant) and games.
Hardware is the same. My monitor is an LCD device with exactly 1280*1024 pixels. With a 100% vector display it would be awful to look at all day. I like the ability to be able to turn on or off 1 pixex, or subpixel, on my monitor.
You end up with an awful and awkward looking experience just for this "feature" which actually isnt all that important.
This page contains an excerpt from Beyond Carnival by James N. Green and tells more about the term. I won't reproduce the text here, or I'll be sent to the Camp of Tolerance. (Hail Lemmiwinks the Gerbil King!)
Personally, I haven't noticed any specific slowness in X for years. Some applications manage to be slow (openoffice sometimes redraws its window pretty slowly after switching workspace, as one example), but in the vast majority the speed of drawing feels practically instant, just the same than on other operating systems (or their GUIs). So I think that the only slowness that I notice is caused by the few applications themselves (or their GUI toolkits) rather than X itself.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
I agree, an intro as to what Fresco is would have been useful. And would probably have saved the owners of http://www.fresco.org/ loads in bandwidth costs. I'd suggest that the slashdot editors consider a brief introduction on each article or lay down some guidelines when posting articles so readers aren't doing a lot of headscratching. Luck!
I have a very small mind and must live with it.
-- E. Dijkstra
What, praytell, does X have to do with copying and pasting of images or formatted text, or divx codecs? X is like the GDI. It does drawing and manages windows. That's it! KDE or GNOME provide the desktop environment. If applications don't interoperate at that level, it's the job of KDE and GNOME to fix it.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
See THIS LINK in the story.
Heh. I love how Apple has turned people into mindless zombies.
"Quartz Extreme" is'nt analagous to "Quartz." "Quartz Extreme" is a way to hardware accelerate window compositing while Quartz is (mostly) a software renderer to draw stuff inside those windows.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I think it's also neat that PicoGUI supports multiple (programming) languages simply by having a documented net protocol -- language bindings talk directly with the renderer over the net, instead of wrapping some C interface.
PicoGUI is also small and cross platform. It's certainly not as old as Fresco, but it looks like they're going to lap Fresco pretty easily.
On another front -- what's Fresco's comparison to NeWS? NeWS, a competitor to X from Sun (late 80's?), had some concepts that were similar to Fresco (and PicoGUI). Considerably more display logic was on the server (renderer). It apparently had lots of bugs and issues, but it actually did reach a usable state. Have they learned from this predecessor? Neither project seems as flexible (NeWS used Postscript for its widgets, so new widgets could be nearly arbitrarily complex)... that flexibility may have been NeWS downfall.
Anyway, it always seemed like a neat idea and an important project to learn from.
I don't see what Berlin/Fresco has to do with the X Window System. Fresco used to be an X11 toolkit, but now it's something completely different.
So, do you make comments like this on CNN? "Where the heck is Israel and what's the big deal about the west bank? Sheesh, can't you guys put a short history lesson about each area and the conflicts involved in every article?"
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
I think anyone reading slashdot for the past few years would know what berlin was.
Of course, since slashdot has gone down in quality so much most of the people from long ago are gone (actualy the comments have been getting a little better lately, but the stories are still crappy as hell)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Damn, what a fugly widget set. Hopefully they'll get something better soon.
How extensible is the API that these people are using, as far as the ability to theme the widgets/windows/etc?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's a developer issue.
IT's still too difficult for developers to know what toolkit to use to write applications for Linux... especially if they wan't something modern.
Yes, they can use GTK. Yes they can use QT.
What version should they pick? What will be the most compatable?
It would be nice to have a NEW display API that really rocks... that's what this is about.
Linux on a 286...won't even BOOT
That's not true. There's a backport of Linux to the 286 (I believe the big technical issue was no MMU...).
May we never see th
KDE doesnt do alpha channel properly, it cannot do realtime shadows yet, it cannot do image transformations such as genie effect, it cannot do realtime scaling, it doesnt fully anti alias everything on screen, it doesnt use your video card to do this in hardware if you do find some software hacks to do this, so X is extremely slow.
KDE better than OSX? hell no, check back in 2-3 years and maybe you'll be right.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Linux looks like shit because it has no Alpha channel effects, Note I didnt say transparency, thats not what I mean, what I mean is, the ability for windows to have diffrent levels of alpha channelling.
This is VERY useful, look at OSX and see how its used, even WindowsXP uses it when you move your icons, the icons become transparent so you can see where you are moving them.
The cursor also needs to become transparent so that it can have proper shadows and look professional, the fonts would also look better, along with the windows.
This isnt about usability, geeks care about usability, WindowsXP isnt the most usable, neither is OSX, you have to balance usability and presentation.
Linux is already easier to use meaning better usability than Windows in most areas, the only real problems left are the lack of polish, Linux still looks amateur, KDE3 can add all these nice effects but if they all are fake, the whole thing looks like a hacker OS that it still is.
Things need to look professional, and this is the purpose of eye candy.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I think SOAP is much better than CORBA to bring a network transparency to GUI. SOAP is more flexible and more language independent (People who tried CJava comm over CORBA will understand).
Unfortunately, SOAP has problems too:
- SOAP will give more overhead if you'll try to use it to deliver individual pixels and mouse events. Although, it's a solvable and configurable tradeoff between latency and overall performance.
- Today SOAP is controlled mostly by Microsoft. I doubt that company will contribute anything to any good open source project. Although, Microsoft itself has some chance if they'll try something like GUI.NET
I wonder if Mono will be capable to sustitute X in future.Less is more !
If it helps explain it at all, CORBA isn't known for being used by PHds. It's generally used by engineers in software companie3s trying to get real work done. Which is not to say that there's anything wrong with being a PHD; just that the academically oriented and the pragmatically oriented tend to use very different measures when determining a technology's worth.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
Um, who would these "open source guys" be? The software I write is open sourced. Does that make me an "open source guy"? Do you think I give a fuck what *you* think Linux needs to compete with Windows? Do you think these Berlin guys do either (though, they'd probably phrase it more diplomatically!) They're working on this because they enjoy it. They're not employees of some Open Source Corporation that have product deadlines and focus groups and such shit.
PS> As for software installation, you're using the wrong distro. Software installation for me is a two second (literally) process where I type "emerge " Same thing for Debian users. Silly Windows users spend precious minutes scouring around the net, downloading a program, navigating to the installer, and clicking 'next' a bazillion times before the program is installed!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Err, it does manage windows to the extent that it handles creation, deletion, and display. The window manager is just reponsible for movement and ordering.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"Also back in the late 1990's many linux users still used pentium 1's and 486's with only 32 or 64 megs of ram! The client/server nature of X was not only inadaquate but it was considered bloated and obsolete."
Yea, just as bloated as on my R3k 25Mhz with 16mb of RAM, right?
Wrong. X11 servers with proper frame buffers ran on stuff wimpier than my Palm Vx with no problems!
XFree86 has always been the problem. That is why so much work went in the 4.x tree towards making the drivers not suck, and why we're starting to see those efforts pay off.
Now it just needs a little more in the basic spec to support more modern windowing features, as well as making everything easier to automate. End users don't want to know about copying dot files with X11 auth permissions, they just want a magic "Roam" button which lets them take their desktop elsewhere in the house.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
A classical fresco is a painting on damp ("fresh") plaster, with the paint penetrating the wall. As such, it tends not to flake off as a painting on dried plaster would, and can last for thousands of years.
This Fresco is cheap middleware on a product of limited utility, and could last for thousands of days, maybe. Maybe not.
If you're concerned about MS 'mostly' controlling SOAP, as you should be, then you'd likely be interested in XML-RPC .
Buy the $200 Linux PC.
The only reaosn Linux isnt selling off the shelves at Walmart is the fact that Windows is more perfesionally looking even if Linux is bette.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
No seriously, what the HELL is the "West Bank"? I know western union, but
they are not a bank, thats fo sho.
This is a bad name, a 'Fresco' open source software project already exists. It is an Mozilla derrivative browser for STB's and has been around since the open sourcing of Netscape.
http://www.antlimited.com/products_fresco.html
okay, maybe this is a little off-topic, but what about audio support? these network-transparent windowing systems are great and all, but it only stands to reason that if a program i'm running produces audio output that i'd want that output directed to the same host that is managing my display. with all the current implementations that i'm aware of, redirecting audio to follow the display is a huge pain in the ass. i wish fresco or x had an integrated audio mixer and transport scheme to transparently sent the noises to the same place as the pictures.
Wow...all I can think is wrong wrong wrong.
You DON'T want SOAP. Have you ever SEEN a SOAP message? It's insane. What you want is a small, binary packet based protocol. The overhead of just PARSING SOAP would totally swamp latency. Yuck yuck yuck. I have developed seriously with CORBA, and while I am not enamored of it (the spec is just way too big, flexible, vague, byzantine and incomprehensible), SOAP is an even "wronger" answer. If anything, you need to go in the other direction - small, binary, application-specific protocol. CORBA is the next best thing, while gaining you portability and lots of existing support. (actually I wish somebody would just implement a native, simpler, RMI to replace CORBA - CORBA is overkill for a lot of things). Think KParts (or whatever custom protocol KDE came up with).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
ALPHA: This means that rendering is able to mix the color that is already on the screen with the new color. But usually it does not keep the original input, so once the colors are mixed they cannot be un-mixed. Another way to state this is that you are painting with "transparent paint". Once the paint is on the wall you cannot get it off, you can only paint over it with more opaque paint.
Alpha is tremendously, vitally important for modern graphics. Many drawings can only be efficienlty stated by using overlayed alpha drawings.
Alpha can also be simulated without any hardware or X server support whatsoever. The end result is *IDENTICAL*. Speed and bloat in the application programs is the problem.
TRANSPARENCY: This is usually taken to mean the storage of alpha in the server. Usually this means that the compositing is done at the last moment, perhaps by hardware, though it could also mean using math tricks to "decompose" the images back apart. The purpose of transparency is so that you can change the overlaying image without having to redo the underlying one (most people think of just moving the overlaying image or changing the layering order, but in fact the overlaying one can be transformed or redrawn arbitrarily).
Oddly enough the first "hardware graphics acceleration" was a type of transparency. "Sprites" were hardware supported long before any graphics, since they allowed objects to move quickly. Even the earliest X servers supported a mouse cursor with some transparency. (of course both of these were 1-bit alpha but the fact that hardware was dedicated to this long before drawing lines or bitblt is interesting).
Currently transparency is most useful for putting anti-aliased edges on objects that move around rapidly, ie overlapping windows. This allows them to be shapes other than rectangles. With partial transparency they can have nice curved shapes or faded edges (ie drop shadows).
It is not practical to do this outside the window server. Not only is it slow, it would require an enormous amount of cooperation between all the programs, and is probably more difficult to design than something inside the server.
There is a lot of similarity between Alpha and Transparency, but often they are implemented with totally different pipelines. It would be nice if the designers made the interface identical (ie you start with a transparent window, and the paint you use also accumulates for that transparency) but from what I know the designers have been too stupid to do this so far.
We don't consider games. Those usually run fullscreen, so why should they bother to use Fresco in the first place? Any windowing system is unneeded overhead for things like that.
CAD and 3D modeller are up another alley:-) Such applications usually manage a scenegraph describing the objects and their relations to each other. That maps wonderfully to Fresco: That uses a scenegraph too. So far we have only very simple demos showing very simple meshes. We could need some help polishing this of a bit.
Performance should be similar to X or window's performance of those applications inside their window. The difference is of course, that with fresco 3D is 'liberated from simple 2D windows'.
This should work over the network. All objects are stored inside the server, so only very little information needs to go over the wire once the object is set up. The server can use whichever graphic acceleration build into the hardware it runs on, independent of wether the client runs locally or connects over the network.
Regards, Tobias
You are very welcome to do so. I just hope you do use WM in a amiga-ish kind of way and don't think Fresco is a WindowManager;-)
Regards, Tobias
Very simple reason: When you use a graphic program, then you do expect to be able to rotate graphics, don't you? So we had to program rotateble graphics. No way around that. In fact we'd have to write some code to stop people from being able to rotate windows! What a waste of time;-)
A Window is a graphic in Fresco. So you can rotate them. Nobody really played with such an idea yet, so I don't know wether it improves useability or not. Somebody suggested to move 'dangerous' operations like 'close window' etc. onto the backside of a window and display some information there (PID, a CPU usage graph, things like that). With Fresco you got the chance to try that...
Finally in a 3D walkin environement you need to be able to display windows in all kinds of ways as you can walk around them. Fresco is capable of running in such an environment (in theory, ran once in a CAVE IIRC but crashed due to buggy libraries;-).
Regards, Tobias
You mention Ruby (which is hardly "hyped" these days) and then you say "industry has a hard time catching on to Smalltalk". You haven't used Ruby have you?
Anyway, your comment essentially agrees with me. Academics are concerned with elegance and perfection. Engineers are concerned with whether something actually works, interoperates well, and solves the problem at hand.
Out of curiousity, exactly what did Smalltalk add to the field of remote invocation? And how was it better than what has come after? Smalltalk has influenced a lot of the best tools & techniques in software engineering, but RMI is one area where I hadn't noticed it having any impact.
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CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum