Is X The Future?

Future Linux-Guru wrote in to tell us about an essay thats running over at OS Opinion that talks about X11s Future. Not an issue we talk about much: Sure, X solves the problem, and in many ways, its very elegant, but is it really the standard that we all want to be using for our GUI coding in the future? This essay argues that we should. Do you agree?

Comments

My Biggest Problems with X

[Jordy]

1) To develop for X you have to be an X Consortium member which costs about $50k/year to do any real work. This is why so much work is being done on layers above X, because no one can actually submit the kind of radical modifications to X that are needed to bring it into the 90's.

2) The X consortium maintains full control over X itself... meaning they can (and have at least once) change the licensing to kill off any free implementations such as xfree86.

3) The software is extremely dated with over a decade of backwards compatibility which no one even uses any more bloating the code base.

4) C... Object Oriented environment.. please. I'm sure a lot of people will bash this, but writing GUI programs in an OO language is simply easier. And before you start on the OO toolkits out there, read the next point.

5) Of course there are C++ and Java toolkits out there, but until they are standard within X, it's a big war. I have roughly 15 X toolkits on my machine to run a total of 8 programs and a window manager. Doesn't anyone else think this is silly?

6) Sluggish. I have AccelX and I have to admit the entire experience is still very slow. Netscape flickers gray every time I scroll up and down, windows take ages to redraw when switching between them, etc. I multiboot to Windows and don't have any of these problems, everything is quite snappy... even if it crashes every 8 hours :)

7) Inconsistant. With all the toolkits out there, it is so very hard to get a nice consistant desktop. I wouldn't even claim that Windows is consistant, but it is pretty close. MacOS is better.. but at least both environments are intuitive.

Once you understand the basics, you can switch between different applications and automatically pickup that the scisors in the toolbar means cut or that the file menu will have an 'exit' entry or even that ctrl-c will copy the selected text (most of the time at least :)

Of course, I am biased on this subject...

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Berlin

[Jordy]

Berlin is a new windowing system for Unix systems designed to replace the aging X Window System. Berlin is currently released under LGPL and is developed using an open development model. We are sponsored in part by SPI who also sponsors the Debian and GNOME projects.

Berlin operates on the object level. All GUI components (widgets), applications, and non-visual components such as audio components, are CORBA accessible components. This means they are network transparent, platform independent, and language independent.

To do things like displaying an application run on a server on your local workstation (the way X does), we abstracted 2D and 3D APIs as much as possible, we also implemented commonly used functions in the display server to reduce the network traffic as much as possible.

If you are familiar with how ActiveX components in Windows work, this should be a very familiar model. All communication between components, applications and Berlin is done via CORBA using the OmniORB2 CORBA ORB (which is recognized as the fastest CORBA implementation out there).

Because we use CORBA, any language with CORBA bindings will be usable for writing Berlin applications and components. These include C, C++, Perl, Java, Python and much more.

We adopted a paradigm similar to the classic Model-View-Controller so that the look of individual components such as buttons is not directly tied to it's interface and can be swapped out easily and painlessly. New components that ship with applications, and indeed the applications themselves, can be used freely by other applications extending the reusability of code to the extreme.

A lot of Berlin's design was taken from Fresco, the competing toolkit to Motif. Fresco is still one of the most advanced toolkits out there and it's influences can be seen in several newer toolkits such as Java's JFC.

Instead of implementing our own video drivers in userspace as X does, our backend currently uses Mesa an OpenGL implementation, but can be replaced without much work. Current versions of Mesa can use a wide variety of video drivers from the integrated drivers in the Linux kernel to X itself.

Overall, we hope to provide all the power we can to developers while ending the excessive desire to create new toolkits in order to add a single widget or modify an existing one.

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