mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) (12/31/89)
lerici@SUPER.ORG (Peter W. Brewer) writes: >Could it be that Sun is still >trying to make something as good as the Apollo Display Manager .. a network >windowing system based on the client server model? No, they've already made something *better* than either X11 or the Apollo Display Manager: a network window system based on the client/server model where the imaging model in the server is *useful*, and helps rather than hinders someone who wants to write an application that has non-trivial display requirements. The place where Sun botched it was in not doing a "sample implementation" of NeWS and making it publicly available in the same way that the "sample implementation" of X11 is freely available. If they had, X would have died off by now, because NeWS is simply a technically superior idea. For the life of me, I still can't understand how anyone involved in the early design phases of X11 thought that a resolution-dependent imaging model based on rectangular arrays of pixels was a good idea, when the groundwork had already been laid for using a page description langauge as the basis of the imaging model in other systems. Was no one familiar with the history of SunDEW, for example? >I think some of the >toolkits coming out for X have alot of promise.. they are also for the most >part still basically public domain freeware. Tell that to OSF -- Motif, which is (alas!) likely to become the dominant X11 toolkit, is considered proprietary software with source code license fees, royalty payments due by software vendors who ship Motif binaries, etc. That's an interesting contrast to Sun -- historically considered the "bad guys" of the window system world for not making NeWS free -- which has finally seen the light and made the XView toolkit freely available to anyone, for any purpose. >In terms of extensibility they all have their good and bad sides. The point is not about toolkits, although personally I don't find any of the existing toolkits terribly worthwhile from the point of view of extensibility. (Writing new widgets, for instance, is considerably more difficult than it needs to be. InterViews might be an exception to the rule that toolkits are hard to extend -- writing in C++ buys you a lot a priori -- but I haven't had a chance to work much with InterViews.) The real point is that X11 is fundamentally flawed by virtue of not providing extensible window *server*. There's no way for an application at runtime to change the characteristics of the server, add new facilities to it, etc. If you look even cursorily at what you can do by downloading PostScript code into the X11/NeWS server, and at the contortions you have to go through to achieve the same thing in X, it should be obvious why a runtime-extensible server is The Right Thing. No, Display PostScript doesn't count. It only allows you to image stuff, not to extend the input handling characteristics of the server the way you can in X11/NeWS. It's also by no means universal, and if you can't count on a facility being in the server, then it might as well not be there. The so-called "extensibility" of the X11 protocol also doesn't count. You have to recompile the server to make extensions. As a software vendor, I shouldn't have to be in the business of writing modified window servers in order to write the kind of applications I want to write. >If NeWS is to find some niche it would >be better off not knocking X but joining with it and enhancing it. Xnews is >a poor attempt at this.. I do not think all of that stuff belongs in the >server. I'd be interested in knowing exactly what you think is wrong with X11/NeWS. Personally, the idea of a single server based on a reasonable imaging model that interprets both X11 and NeWS protocol requests seems like the most elegant way to provide the X11 compatibility that the market demands without sacrificing the inherently superior characteristics of NeWS. (Don't get me wrong -- there are some things wrong with X11/NeWS. One is that it runs too slowly and uses too much memory, but that can be fixed if Sun gets on the ball technically. Another is that making "point" == "pixel" in NeWS PostScript was just stupid -- granted you can't discover automatically the resolution of your display device, since the hardware doesn't tell you, but you could at least provide command line flags or environment variables read by the server that would let the *user* tell you what the resolution is. Maybe in OpenWindows 1.1??) -- Matt Landau mlandau@bbn.com Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.
barnett@crdgw1.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) (01/02/90)
In article <13323@diamond.BBN.COM>, mlandau@bbn (Matt Landau) writes: >Was no one familiar >with the history of SunDEW, for example? Mesa, Cedar and Docs (1980) had an advanced image model four years before SunDEW. -- Bruce G. Barnett <barnett@crd.ge.com> uunet!crdgw1!barnett
bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) (01/02/90)
(Bob starts the new year by diving into a flamefest :-)
In article <13323@diamond.BBN.COM> mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) writes:
The place where Sun botched it was in not doing a "sample
implementation" of NeWS and making it publicly available in the
same way that the "sample implementation" of X11 is freely
available.
Right! And it's surprising that their marketeers didn't see that.
Enough people at the time were offering such suggestions as free
advice, one wonders why Sun didn't listen. It's too late now.
If they had, X would have died off by now, because NeWS is simply a
technically superior idea.
X may not have died off yet. It has become a rallying point for other
companies' marketeers who noticed that Sun was getting its name on too
many innovations that were being adopted as de-facto standards. The
widespread adoption of X was, IMHO, largely in response to the
announcement of NeWS. And since that time we've seen corresponding
marketing department-based battles over the underlying operating
systems (Why do you think OSF exists? Entirely for marketing and
political reasons, the technical concerns included as an afterthought.
But I digress still more...).
For the life of me, I still can't understand how anyone involved in
the early design phases of X11...
My understanding is that X grew from W, the window system atop the V
kernel from Stanford.
...Was no one familiar with the history of SunDEW, for example?
V happened before SunDEW, and X just carried much of W's basic
technology along. An interesting semi-early (1985) reference is
"Methodology of Window Management", Aho, Hopgood, and Ullman;
Springer-Verlag. Sorry, my copy is at home, else I'd have the ISBN
handy to cite. The conference of which the book contains the
proceedings discusses various historic approaches to windows and user
interfaces on various underlying software architectures (Cedar, UNIX,
Perqs, etc.) Well worth reading.
No, Display PostScript doesn't count.
Right! It's another marketing-originated red herring. It's useful
for those without a sufficient imaging model who realized later (as
PostScript printers became universal) that they needed to invoke the
magic P-word for "compatibility".
The so-called "extensibility" of the X11 protocol also doesn't
count.
It might help to have a sample implementation of a server that would
be protocol-extensible on the fly, at runtime.
In the mean time, X runs on everything and there are lots and lots of
people writing free software for it. I use X mainly for those
reasons, though my aesthetic sensibilities cry out for better.mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) (01/03/90)
bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) writes: >(Bob starts the new year by diving into a flamefest :-) (Bob starts the new year by saying some remarkably reasonable things :-) > The place where Sun botched it was in not doing a "sample > implementation" of NeWS and making it publicly available >Right! And it's surprising that their marketeers didn't see that. >Enough people at the time were offering such suggestions as free >advice, one wonders why Sun didn't listen. It's too late now. Maybe not. I recently learned first-hand the degree to which customer opinion really can make a difference in Sun corporate policy. It's a little-known fact that until quite recently (the last couple of weeks), Sun had OpenWindows on a tight allocation policy, which is why people who'd ordered it months ago were still waiting for their tapes. At the recent Sun User Group conference, several of us got wind of this fact, and we were rather ... ahem ... "outspoken" ... in our opinion that this was a critical tactical mistake, and tantamount to suicide for both NeWS and Open Look. Basically, lots of people complained real loudly about this brain-dead policy (I spent about 45 minutes talking to Carl Wolf in the gripe booth, and another 30 talking to Scott McNealy; other people raised the issue in the public question-and-answer sessions and the executive roundtable.) The result was that, according to a piece of mail I got from a friend inside Sun, OpenWindows has been taken off allocation and will ship to all customers who order it. What's the point? The point is that if enough people make enough noise, things can change. Now ask yourself what might happen if Sun were to donate the source to X11/NeWS to the MIT X Consortium, just for the sake of promoting it as a superior technology that wasn't under Sun's complete control anymore... After all, Sun's done something similar with control of the Sparc processor architecture... And AT&T is doing something vaguely similar with SvR4... So ask yourself what might happen if X11R5 (or X12 or something) were based on the merged NeWS/X server... Then ask yourself how we might make this happen...
graham@fuel.dec.com (kris graham) (01/05/90)
In article <13324@granite.BBN.COM>, mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) writes: > Now ask yourself what might happen if Sun were to donate the source to > X11/NeWS to the MIT X Consortium, just for the sake of promoting it as a > superior technology that wasn't under Sun's complete control anymore... > After all, Sun's done something similar with control of the Sparc processor > architecture... And AT&T is doing something vaguely similar with SvR4... > So ask yourself what might happen if X11R5 (or X12 or something) were > based on the merged NeWS/X server... Then ask yourself how we might make > this happen... I have heard a lot about the so-called "Technical Superiority" of NeWS. Anybody care to educate us non-believers of this claim. I have never thought of Postscript as a friendly language to program in.....or love a windowing system that makes the implementation of a print screen facility more tedious than necessary ; BTW: On a more cynical note, we all know the outcome of the "SPARC versus XXX" 'technical superiority" battle ;-) One of my co-workers, Larry Timmins, has been involved in multiple ports of applications originally done with Sun's toolkits. On average, for every six months (calendar time) that the customer/software house put into the project, only one month was needed with DECwindows' XUI toolkit. Using the Intrinsics -based toolkit reduces the network requests and ultimately has proven itself over and over. Regarding the donation of X11/NeWS, fine -- put it in the contrib like others have. However, when OSF went with the XUI toolkit, it was a fully tested production -quality toolkit at over 300 sites. What is needed is solid incremental contributions and not yet another toolkit, approach, etc. Christopher Graham Digital Equipment Corp Ultrix Resource Center New York City Internet: graham@fuel.enet.dec.com UUCP: ...!decwrl!fuel.enet.dec.com!graham I speak as an individual, not representing any organisation or company.
barnett@grymoire.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) (01/12/90)
In article <1558@riscy.dec.com> graham@fuel.dec.com (kris graham) writes: |One of my co-workers, Larry Timmins, has been involved in multiple ports |of applications originally done with Sun's toolkits. On average, for every six |months (calendar time) that the customer/software house put into the project, |only one month was needed with DECwindows' XUI toolkit. Using the Intrinsics |-based toolkit reduces the network requests and ultimately has proven itself |over and over. I question this. If the toolkit was SunView, there are no network requests. How can you reduce zero? It the toolkit was NeWS based, the application could be tuned to reduce network traffic to the minimum needed. If the toolkit was Xview (which seems unlikely), the program might come from the semi-automatic conversion of SunView to XView. This typically includes a PixWin emulation package that should be re-written into the proper Xlib routines for efficiency reasons. In the 6 months of the customer time, how much was spend on just the toolkit? I expect a lot of that time was spend on writing the application itself, and your 6 months :: 1 month ratio is not a valid comparison. If you have any facts to justify your claim, I would really be interested. -- Bruce G. Barnett barnett@crd.ge.com uunet!crdgw1!barnett