Re: [xougen] Regarding server side widgets

[weigelt]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 04:50:58PM -0400, William Lahti wrote:

Hi,

> If both server and client are on the localhost it uses UNIX sockets which 
> are just like shared memory, albeit its moved slightly more. Linux does 
> UNIX system sockets just as fast as shared memory, 
aehm, I dont agree. If you use unix sockets, the data still has to be 
copied multiple times. When moving around huge images or textures, it
really costs time. 

<snip>
> And now we have server side toolkits, Fresco (Mac?) style. In the way it was 
> described earlier on this list, it fails to gain anything at all. If you 
> suggest this because Windows(R) widgets are server-side... they are not. They 
> are rendered by the GDI (dll library for graphics used by winapi to do most 
> rendering stuff). The only difference between the X model and the Windows 
If I understood it right, the Citrix Server dock in somewhere in the 
widget toolkit and so is able to work with much lower traffic than when 
we're pushing all paint operations over the net.

<snip>
> I think the notion of widgets needs to be abstracted from X as it is now.
> It doesn't offer enough benefit over the obvious HUGE changes to nearly
> all X servers, as well as adding a huge amount of code, thus making X
> less portable to embedded platforms. Do we want to do that?
Embedded Systems do not need to implement it. We always have an fallback
do window based operations.

<snip>
> That's not to say I wouldn't encourage standardizing a style guide 
> at Freedesktop, if we can get QT+KDE/GTK+GNOME people to agree. Which
> can be pretty tough needless to say **cough**flame wars**cough**.
Well, must stuff these widgets really do is almost the same. The APIs 
are different. Both have little widgets doing not really much. For example
an button is an very stupid think - can have appr. 4 faces, which mostly
are generated from some style an some text, sometimes from pixmaps.
Listboxes are things which simply contain an list of text lines, where
we can move up and down. All these scrolling stuff doesnt really require
interaction with the application and could also be done in the presentation
manager (to talk w/ OS/2 words). These things are always the same - no 
matter what toolkit you're using - and it are always the same information
which would go over the network with an server side widget toolkit - 
no matter how the button or list looks like and what API the application
uses. There are perhaps differences in event handling, but almost all
toolkits have any kind of signal mechanism, which pass (mostly filterable)
objects to widget- oder window-specific handlers. Windows also does this.

> I believe there is a Shared-pixmap extension or something along those
> lines... why not simply have the toolkits construct and draw the widgets
> based on the shared pixmaps provided by either a 'widget manager' or
> a window manager? 
hmm. It would be nice, if we had an pixmap storage on server side, just
like resources in windows, but with an namespace instead of anonymous handles.
the data is uploaded when really needed - the X server could also save 
them on the server's filesystem, so an reload is not needed. it should also
be possible to define diffent namespaces and put multiple applications
into the same namespace - so common used pixmaps, i.e KDE icons or buttons
are only uploaded once.

> Albeit animation for widgets is tougher, but if that extension that Havoc 
> thought up (not the damage one, the shared drawing targets one he thinks 
> will make the damage one obselete) becomes reality (I really like the idea 
> and am looking into the possibilities) than that could be done easily also.
hmm. what kind of animation ? Is it an short sequence of pixmaps ?
Then it wont be such an problem to put it completely on server side.

cu
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