[comp.windows.x] X10 vs X11; X10 XDrawFilled

wohler@SPAM.ISTC.SRI.COM (Bill Wohler) (05/18/88)

folks,

  do any of you have a document that compares X10 and X11, preferably
  one that is biased towards the advantages of X11 over X10?  if not,
  could you mention a point or two of why you would use X11 or why you
  wouldn't use X10.  thank you!

  also, my X10 XDrawFilled (mono sun 3/50 os 3.4) draws the outline of
  a polygon (rectangle) but isn't filling it.  any ideas?

						--bw

jim@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Jim Fulton) (05/18/88)

There are many reasons for going with X11 over X10, some of which include:

    o technical
	-  off-screen graphics
	-  save-unders and backing store
	-  better color support, including colormap resources and deep frame
		buffers 
	-  better imaging support (circles, arcs, kerned fonts, graphics 
		attributes available across all requests)
	-  stateful rather than stateless graphics (i.e. use of
		GraphicsContext instead of passing state every time) makes for
		higher performance on some devices and makes programming 
		easier
	-  client-side creation of resources means substantial speedup of
		sophisticated applications
	-  MUCH better window manager support; you can build a wider variety
		of user interfaces, including point-and-click, reparenting
		(title bars), and tiling
	-  window properties provide elegant way to pass information among
		communicating clients (e.g. selections are easy to implement)
	-  more complete set of events (e.g. visibility, configuration, etc.)
	-  more versatile keyboard support, including keyboards with lots of
		keys and doing grabs of specific keys
	-  client-specifiable clipping regions
	-  supported mechanism for adding extensions
	-  programming libraries better designed, languages other than just C
		supported.
	-  3d extensions becoming available 
	-  much better toolkits, making sophisticated User Interfaces easier
		to build
	-  greater number of available platforms from which to choose
	-  protocol translator available so you can still run X10 binaries
	-  sample code provided so all graphics requests should be implemented
		(i.e. no more "XDrawFilled isn't implemented on Suns")
	-  better support for distributed environments
	-  much larger body of people using X11 than X10, this leads to more
		publicly available code, more bug reports (and fixes) of 
		standard code

    o non-technical
	-  X11 is supported by just about every hardware vendor in the industry
	-  many software companies are porting to X11
	-  higher level toolkits and User Interface Management Systems are
		becoming commercially available for X11
	-  X11 is being pursued by a number of standards bodies
	-  finding help with X10 problems will soon get exponentially harder
	-  your friendly, neighborhood X Consortium staff :-)


>  also, my X10 XDrawFilled (mono sun 3/50 os 3.4) draws the outline of
>  a polygon (rectangle) but isn't filling it.  any ideas?

Switch to X11!

					Jim Fulton
					X Consortium
					MIT Laboratory for Computer Science 
					(617) 253-1428
					jim@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU