nanogui: Thread: Re: Running standalone apps in MicroWin]

forwarding to the list, forgot to CC...

Greg Haerr wrote:

> : What would I need to do to get standalone apps to work in Microwin?
> : Nano-X seems to do a really nice job of it.
> :
> : Though the underlying drawing mechanisms are the same, the architecture
> : of MicroWin and Nano-X seem different.
>
> Yes, Nano-X takes advantage of the X-like client/server architecture, because
> it uses id's and never pointers when making calls to the server.  The Win32
> architecture wasn't designed that way, and requires more sophisticated
> (read complicated) mechanisms like marshalling in order to get the same job
> done.
>
> I'm working on this problem, and one idea stands out as more revolutionary:
> That is to have the Microwindows server run as a process, using shared libraries
> for all the clip and draw code, and share a data segment with other processes
> desiring to use the graphics services.  Then, when a new process is started,
> it uses the same shared libraries for the clip and draw code, but gets it's
> clipping information from the shared data segment.  Then, the application
> draws directly to the framebuffer, rather than sending the data down a
> socket.

So that would mean there would be a single bit of code to initialise the segment on
startup and then when creating an individual window, the window gets a piece of
data to write on and that is where things are drawn  (I'll see if I can draw a
diagram, I think I know what you mean though).

It's different. The implementation details would still be hidden from an app, this
is just the architecture for drawing on the nanoGUI memory, correct ? If we were
writing directly to the FB, this would be fairly quick I think.

I'll try and track down where this get's done for the single demo app at the
moment.

I'm just thinking about an app similar to 'PC Anywhere'. Would we still be able to
resend all of the paint messages to somewhere to reproduce the whole screen
remotely ? I don't mean individual apps or windows, I'm thinking of the whole
screen (vnc is another similar app). I think this would be possible, since we have
the whole Windows architecture anyway. Just not 100% sure.

Thanks for that.


>
>
> This architecture promises to be much faster than X, but it is limited to
> running
> on the same system, and having direct access to Linux framebuffer.  For many
> applications, this will be just fine.
>
> Regards,
>
> Greg
>
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Cheers
David