Whoosh! [LWN.net]

Whoosh!

Posted Jul 29, 2010 10:01 UTC (Thu) by droundy (guest, #4559)
In reply to: Whoosh! by jmorris42
Parent article: GUADEC: Luis Villa points GNOME at the web

Is it because making everything a client server ajax app is going to be easier? Not bloody likely. Is it to make it network transparent? Uh, we have had that since day one with X.

I don't know if you've tried running an X application over the network recently. I ran emacs yesterday across the country, and let me tell you, it was painful! We're talking minutes of startup time and perhaps 10 seconds to refresh the screen. I'd be surprised if that's what's going to beat AJAX.

On the other hand, I don't look forward to the bloat of making everything run under the browser, either...

Remote access protocols

Posted Jul 29, 2010 20:35 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (2 responses)

Thinking about running stuff over X over the the net, I wonder how difficult and strange it would be to implement a version of X that ran in a browser?

With Canvas and/or SVG, combined with Image objects and HTML fragments, an application could send graphics and text and receive keyboard and mouse events.

Lots of stuff wouldn't work, but I bet it could be very interesting.

Actually, isn't there already some version of ExtJS that can render for a Qt backend using signal/slot programming? Pretty sure I read about that somewhere...

Remote access protocols

Posted Aug 2, 2010 0:37 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Dunno if you've seen the VNCs that run in the browser now but that might be close...

http://kanaka.github.com/noVNC/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/thinvnc/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guacamole/

Remote access protocols

Posted Aug 3, 2010 0:51 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

Thinking about running stuff over X over the the net, I wonder how difficult and strange it would be to implement a version of X that ran in a browser?

There's a lovely version called XML11. It implements X11 (some level of it...) in JavaScript with XML messaging, and the demos, at least, were very cool. But that's not all it does: since it's JS-based, it can actually run code locally on the server (i.e., your browser), not just regular X display stuff. The canonical example is a calculator app; the "X11 version" just sends display commands to the browser and accepts events (button pushes, typed numbers, etc.) from it, with the calculations happening on the "client" end (in the X sense--what everybody else calls the server). But the "XML11 version" actually sends some or all of the application code to the browser/server to execute there. I vaguely recall that the X client ("regular server") code was Java-based.

At any rate, my experience with it started with a demo/presentation and ended with some reading of the docs, so I don't really know how complete it is. Looks like development ended about three and a half years ago--unfortunate but not surprising, given its relative lack of publicity. It might be worth resurrecting, though, if web-based X apps intrigue you.

Greg