[Xorg] Server side widgets

Ely Levy elylevy-xserver at cs.huji.ac.il
Sun Jul 11 10:16:31 PDT 2004


On Sun, 11 Jul 2004, Roland Mainz wrote:

> Ely Levy wrote:
> > latly I saw quite a few flame wars about server side widgets,
> > People from projects like y-windows and onyx claim for performance
> > improvments and nicer cleaner implementations,
> > as well as that X doesn't support it from the plain reason it is old.
> > I got the impression it was a design descision, which lead to many
> > diffrent tool kits.
> >
> > My question is, why did X chose not to use server side widgets (if it was
> > ever concidered)?
>
> Well, you will need something like a server-side language to get the
> widgets working. DPS(=Display PostScript) was capable to do server-side
> widgets - but somehow DPS was lost deep in hell.
> Today such a project will likely "die" in the flamewar "which language
> should be used: JAVA, Perl, PostScript, TCL, bash(ouch!) etc. ..." ...
> =:-)
I think ywindows onyx persco just used simple c/c++?
What the advantage of bytecode?

> This issue could be solved via a platform-independent bytecode
> interpreter... but I still doubt that something like server-side widgets
> will ever become popular - it's a radically different approach compared
> to today's toolkits and people don't like to rewrite/invent the stuff
> from scratch if the "old ways" still work.
Yea, but if that is the reason, moving forward should happen at some
point.

> > and what other advantages/disadvatages it has?
>
> First things which come in mind: How can I debug those widgets ? How can
> I stop one widget from screwing up the whole server (e.g. grab CPU, grab
> all memory) ?


Write them well?:)
actually i saw it happen in client side as well, making certain
clients go berserk and take all CPU,
so there isn't much diffrance IMOH.

Ely




More information about the xorg mailing list