Remote access protocols [LWN.net]

Remote access protocols

Posted Jul 29, 2010 20:35 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285)
In reply to: Whoosh! by droundy
Parent article: GUADEC: Luis Villa points GNOME at the web

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 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