[Xorg] Server side widgets

[Roland Mainz]

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. ..." ...
=:-)
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.

> 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) ?

----

Bye,
Roland

-- 
  __ .  . __
 (o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org
  \__\/\/__/  MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer
  /O /==\ O\  TEL +49 641 7950090
 (;O/ \/ \O;)