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?

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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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