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Gosling: If I Designed a Window System Today...

Posted by michael on from the hindsight-is-20-20 dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In his blog entry for the 10th August, James Gosling (finally) publishes a short paper he wrote in 2002 entitled 'Window System Design: If I had to do it over again in 2002'. His design is to make the window system do the absolute minimum and move all the work into the client."

5 of 431 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Network bandwidth? by be-fan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    He's not suggesting sending over huge amounts of pixel data. If the app speaks OpenGL, you can ship over the OpenGL command stream. Since OpenGL was designed to support network rendering from day 1, this can be very efficient.

    --
    A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
  2. Re:Good idea by ipfwadm · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It takes about 2 seconds for MS Word to come up on my laptop when running on batteries. When plugged in, that would presumably be a tad faster. Even if your central server can have it open in 0.1 seconds, I would bet that the network latency would make that 1.9 seconds all but go away, and 1.9 seconds isn't much of an inconvenience to me anyway. Sure, some apps take longer, but once I've started those up, they usually stay open for a long long time. Besides, we're still only talking about a few seconds of initialization time -- Visual Studio just took 4 seconds, Photoshop CS took 20. I waste more time blowing my nose.

    There's a reason nobody runs client-server. Desktop systems with fast processors are just too cheap.

  3. Re:Good idea by Jeremi · · Score: 5, Insightful
    m afraid I disagree with the idea of a minimalist windowing system - one that leaves most everything to user level libraries. This still leaves the door wide open for applications to implement various looks, various copy/paste mechanisms, and other things that annoy people.


    So you don't want a windowing system that is flexible, because people might want to take advantage of that flexibility?


    I think your reasoning is a misguided attempt to solve by technical means what is really a politicial/sociological problem. The proper solution is to have a strong set of UI guidelines and standard libraries that make it trivially easy to follow those standards, not to limit the capability of the system just because you don't trust people not to abuse it.

    --


    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  4. Re:Good idea by nathanh · · Score: 5, Insightful
    In the common case, there is no client or server, just an app running on a PC. So don't build the assumption of networking into windowing.

    OK. So let's run with that idea. We still have multiple clients and one set of hardware, so we need to arbitrate the access. We also need to have a common place where the clients can share information like window clip lists. Then there are issues like drag and drop, cut and paste, etc which also require inter-client communication. And how do you solve the issue of two clients seeing the mouse button being pressed, and both assuming that the click was for them?

    At one stage you realise you need to have a program, somewhere, that coordinates all of the clients. Assuming this won't be the kernel, it must be another userspace program. We call this program "the X server". And because we have all these clients in userspace, and the X server is also in userspace, they need to use some form of inter-process communication. XFree86 and X.org already use UNIX sockets; one of the fastest IPC methods available. The only thing faster would be shared memory but that's been tried before and it's more hassle than it's worth.

    Now admittedly there are some situations where the clients simply need to talk directly to the hardware. For example the client needs to upload a 3D texture or render an MPEG-2 frame. For those situations it makes no sense to send that data to the X server first. So for those situations we do have solutions that bypass the X server and go directly to the hardware. These include the DRI extension, the MIT-SHM extension and the DGA extension.

  5. Bad idea by haraldm · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This concept kills the concept of thin clients and X terminals - that are way more in widespread use than most people think.

    Letting the app take care of its own window borders is a bad idea as well. This is one of the worst parts in M$ Windows - once an app hangs, there is no way of closing or minimizing a window or simply of getting it out of the way. It's way better to have this handled by a separate process.

    --
    open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;