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Miguel de Icaza Debates Avalon with an Avalon Designer
Karma Sucks writes "In an interesting debate with a Microsoft employee, Miguel points out some crucial flaws in Microsoft's Avalon strategy. Perhaps the most shocking revelation is the absolutely horrendous inheritence hierarchy exposed by the Avalon API. Miguel himself is clearly not amused, saying 'We do not want to waste our time with dead-end APIs as we are vastly under-resourced, so we must choose carefully.'"
" I totally agree, this is a huge issue. Phishing attacks, spyware, malware, viruses, and more are out there and probably the largest problem facing computer science today. This isn't a Microsoft, Linux, or Java issue - this is a "good guys" issue. Windows XP SP2 is probably the best response to Miguel's security concerns. The integrated firewall, security center, and dozens of other security related features are really the first line of defense. After the basics are resolved there, I would say that the new enhancements to the security system in Avalon are a great step. Not only is Avalon built from the ground up to be secure, but we are enhancing the security system for better application level security, and simpler more understandable presentation of security decisions to the user (hopefully in most cases this means no decision). As to the specific issue of Phishng that Miguel brings up, that is still mostly a research level issue, which I'd love to see creative solutions to. In Windows today there is the secure desktop, but you must press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to get to it first. "
Creative Demolition
with further explanation that means it can use the 3d acceleration of your video card and interface with directx as part of the graphics api to accelerate/render your desktop.
Because you don't know what you're talking about.
1) Microsoft isn't porting anything to Linux.
2) Miguel doesn't work for Microsoft, and never has.
3) Miguel works for Ximian, a company he founded, and which is now owned by Novell.
That's not so weird. Everyone oohs and aahs when there's a slashdot article about OSS 3D desktops, myself included.
.
I think desktop apps flipping around in 3D and all the new ways you could work with apps would be cool.
But DirectX isn't right for the task, it's too low level. Too much DX code only works on ATi or nVidia, too many vendor specific extensions and shitty drivers. It's great for tweaking the crap out of Doom 3 so it goes as fast as it can, but it would suck if some pixel shader operation that only works on Geforces blowed up my coding session
Avalon is higher level, not trying to implement the latest hardware tweaks and gizmos, just base functionality you can count on across the board.
There's no redundancy, the way I see it. Two different tools for two different tasks.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
unlike the current pixel based 2d rendering system of today.
Um... say what?
Ok, to begin with Avalon doesn't support SVG, which is one of the things Miguel was blasting them for.
Secondly.. 2D rendering is not 'pixel based' today.
It's never been 'pixel based'. Windows has had device-independent 2D rendering since.. well, forever. (Windows Metafiles ring a bell?) So has just about everything else (Mac, Atari) too, (X doesn't, but the Unix platform tended to use PostScript for that stuff).
What is new here is the support of more advanced things like compositing (something you couldn't do device-independently before). OS X already has this of course in Quartz.
I've said this before, here and elsewhere: WGHIII[1] has said several times in the past (and was at conferences in the mid '90s when & where he said them): "...people do not want bug fixes - they want new features...". This is frequently borne out by the underlying architecture Microsoft presents in their products. A semi-stable underpinning, capable of supporting certain elements is put into place such that products & features can be built upon that architecture. "Patching Architectural Holes" (Security, Stability, etc.) can be fixed via patches later[2]. Unfortunately, this means users suffer frustration for a semi "feature rich", unstable product, and developers discover situations where they write "three sides around the barn" when the pieces don't fit together as the philosophy would lead one to believe.
. html
There are other companies which spend a lot of time on the architecture - almost to a fault - knowing once it is solid, they can add the users' heavily desired features without worry about the stability beneath it.
All developers know about both scenarios as they either crave and know the the outcome if they are permitted to put the architectural stability in place or they are forced to charge ahead with building on top of wet toilet paper.
[1]William Henry Gates 3rd
[2]Providing a vendor is even willing to do so. And the question begs to be answered: How unstable can an architecture be such that patches can be safely made to it (without risking screwing the pooch) to make an improvement? Remember the "three sides around the barn" development? What happens to developed code if the OS suddenly "works" correctly?
Just remember....
______________________________________
My Trunk Monkey can beat up your Trunk Monkey.
http://www.suburbanautogroup.com/ford/trunkmonkey
- Microsoft talking design and technologies out in the open with other developers who aren't Microsoft employees? Even talking with Free software advocates? Man, that's good to hear, honestly. If this were system-wide, I bet it'd be good for both sides.
- Reading Miguel mention that many APIs (Avalon, Tk, Swing, GNOME, Xview, Motif) at least gives one the impression that he might actually know what he's talking about. Let me give him the benefit of the doubt. It makes me wonder how many Microsoft employees have that much understanding of non-Microsoft APIs. Probably plenty, but the few I have encountered seem so immersed in Microsoft culture that they appear to have little understanding of what's going on outside of the Microsoft sphere.
Now, I should say that I'm no real programmer, but I've done some. The "real" programming I've done is computational code that runs in the console, with a couple of GUI front ends. So, I'm not going to claim any kind of serious perspective on this.Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
SVG is part of the avalon concept done through the XAML interface.
Except that Microsoft does not follow the SVG standard. So it's not SVG, it's just similar.
As for 2d rendering, it has always been pixel/bitmap fill based and not vector based.
Again, you are wrong. Although you seem to believe it, SVG isn't the first vector graphics format in existance. Not by a long shot. (PostScript is from 1984) Nor is Avalon the first device-independent 2D-graphics API.
Providing a ref to the SVG spec doesn't make it true.
Ok? Now, I've contributed fixes to Apache Batik, (an SVG library) and I've also written PostScript generators, and most recently I've contributed stuff to the Java2D library for libgcj. (another 2D library which is not 'pixel based')
I do believe I know something of vector graphics.
A number of my peers like to bitch about how "Swing is hard to learn" and I get called an elitist for laughing at them. Of course, unlike most of them I have tried to learn other toolkits and have come to the conclusion that Swing's design really is the de facto gold standard for how a GUI toolkit should be arranged for practical development. It is fast, extremely logically structured and the documentation is really straight to the point for when you need to look stuff up.
I could never get used to Windows Forms. It still amazes me that the layout manager concept isn't considered a standard part of the UI toolkit design process now. Developers shouldn't have to automatically manage most GUI layouts.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
This is a call to arm, sent out to all sensible /.ers. PLEASE, DO NOT embed senseless links within your story submission. It goes against the ethics of every data purist out there to have to mouse over words like "interesting" and "debate", carefully examining the status bar URL, to find out WTF that link points to. Enough already.
That isn't the right one.
http://slashdot.org/~miguel
I remember reading something by some ex-microsoftie. One of the comments he said stuck in my mind. he said that it's not that microsoft doesn't like standards, it's more that if you follow a standard, then you're admitting that you can't do better than the standard. Why use opengl when you could change a whole heap of things to make it "better" and have directx instead?
Which seems to me to miss the point of having standards. The value in standards isn't in whatever the standard specifies, it's the fact that everyone else is implementing the same standard.
Hey guys,
Just wanted to point out that the inflamatory
comments that are being made in my name are someone
else's idea of fun. Some guy decided to squatter
the login `Miguel de Icaza'.
Miguel.
I do not hate Microsoft, but I think that they will
eventually open source some interesting pieces of
software. The pieces are already in movement.
Microsoft is like any other corporation, they have
to do what is best for their shareholders. They
have had a pretty good ride but Linux and open
source have changed the plane, so they will
likely have to transform in the future in a different
kind of company.
In either case, working for Microsoft is not the
end of the world. I just happen to be a lot
happier working for Novell doing open source
software and working with many talented developers
from the Novell background, the SUSE background
and Ximian. An opportunity in a lifetime to
reshape this industry.
Miguel.
Oh, come on... when I wrote BlogX (the blog software I use) I wanted a unique ID for each post. I post more than once a day (Miguel's software doesn't have permalinks per post, only per day) and I didn't want to uniquify the titles... Radio uses monotonically increasing numbers, other software uses UTC datestamps to the millisecond, etc...
ChrisAn http://blog.simplegeek.com
The average programmer doesn't care the the hierarchy is 10 or 11 levels deep (well at least until the next avalon release comes out). But Microsoft should care, and Ximian also cares. Very deep inheritance hierarchies are tough to maintain. Inheritance is a pretty intimate binding of two classes and changes higher up in the hierarchy sometimes have disasterous changes down the line. From a talk that I heard Stroustrup give, he doesn't care for them much either. (I didn't attend this one, but I imagine it is the same based on the slides.)
In this day and age, the commonly accepted wisdom is that you break functionality into interfaces and you write shallow helper classes to degalate to for common implementations of those interfaces. (C# is quite possibly the best language there is for supporting this architecture.) This way you don't force the user to use implementations they don't want when they want to program to a particular interface in your system.
If you look at the code for eclipse, you'll see a good example of this design in action.
Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true! -Homer Simpson
I tried to expand on my comments in my next post... "First, an old post from Joe Beda about SVG and XAML. Second, dismissing the CSS debate isn't really fair. A critical part of our design is unification. We didn't want one markup model for vector graphics, one for styling, one for 3D, one for data, etc. Another part of the unification was "Markup == OM", that is, we didn't want a separate markup programming model from code. HTML is this way, the markup and the code have a loose relationship. If we ignore the unification debate, I can understand how it seems simple to say "you should have used SVG". Avalon is a developer platform. We want to enable an entirely new breed of applications that span UI, graphics, and media. Integration of typography with imaging with video with controls with styling is a core part of our value proposition. We aren't trying to create a new 3D system or animation system, we are creating a new developer platform. "
ChrisAn http://blog.simplegeek.com