I'm back! (and other things)

On Fri, Oct 27, 2000 at 06:20:30PM -0700, Cameron Kaiser wrote: There are a couple of entries at http://gw.kb7pwd.ampr.org/~ecloud/journal/ Basically it's a much higher-level client/server GUI system than has been created so far. NeWS seemed like a good place to start, and I think I will be able to build some higher-level stuff on top of it. So I'm trying to recreate something a lot like NeWS as the first step. It is based on Postscript but goes beyond Display Postscript in a couple of ways; one, it has an event model. Postscript code can handle events and dynamically modify the GUI. Two, it is object-oriented. I decided on the Postscript language only recently; there are a lot of other possible choices, and I'm not sure this is the right one, but at least it would seem to be one of the easiest interpreted languages to optimize. Speed and memory are both critical, because I want to do ports to some classic computers which exist in large volumes (68K macs, 386 (maybe even 286) PCs, etc.) so that they can have a second life as graphics terminals to run applications hosted on more powerful machines. A metawidget could be something as simple as a "command object", a single atomic "action" that could be represented by a menu item or a toolbar button depending on the client implementation; all the way up to complete "view" tiers which are reusable across applications. What's important is that I will be striving for total platform independence. Many applications should be able to work on any scale of machine, from a wristwatch up to a supercomputer; but with some graceful degradation of functionality. (or not so graceful, in extreme cases when the screen real estate and/or interaction techniques are completely inadequate) Because so much is left to the client implementation, there will be a lot of freedom to innovate new interaction techniques, which immediately become available to all applications. So after the base implementation is done, there can be some e.g. PDA implementations which have some of the advanced interaction techniques that the Newton had ("commands" being initiated by gestures, really good handwriting recognition, etc.) and the applications will not need to know or care, because all the functionality will be client-side. It's the logical next step beyond "themes". And while a client-server GUI system is overkill on today's PDAs, wireless internet access is quickly becoming available. Ricochet is finally starting service in Phoenix. In a year or two I suspect I'll be accessing applications running at home, from my PDA. (but maybe they will be ordinary web applications, if I'm not done with the metawidget stuff by then) A Lisp machine could do graphics too couldn't it? Was there anything particularly impressive about it? I seriously considered using Scheme before settling on Postscript; but decided that it is harder to optimize, because more structures would probably be dynamically allocated, and it relies more heavily on garbage collection. I think my Postscript interpreter will be able to do without garbage collection in most if not all cases. But I don't know much about the internals of Scheme/Lisp interpreters. I used Guile for some initial experiments. -- _______ Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD ecloud(a)bigfoot.com (_ | |_) http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud kb7pwd(a)kb7pwd.ampr.org __) | | \________________________________________________________________