hassan_sul99@yahoo.com
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NeWS was a great thing from Sun (it is a dead Sun product; in SunOS5.3, coming out FCS in december 1993, there is no more NeWS, just an X11R5 server with Display Postscript) . NeWS means Network extensible Window System (or Server). Actually, Sun's window server was a mixture of NeWS and X11R4, but these can be almost viewed as 2 different servers sharing common devices (mouse, keyboard, screen). More precisely, the X11 server was a special NeWS lightweight process (see below). NeWS and X11 had different ports and different protocols. I am talking of the latest NeWS server (in Openwin3). Integrating NeWS and X11 was a difficult problem to Sun, and they did not succeed perfectly on it.The NeWS3 reference manual has part number 800-6736-10 from SunSoft (september 1991). The NeWS Toolkit 3 reference manual has part number 800-6319-10.
The key idea of NeWS (and you already know it) was that the window server was programmable. So a typical NeWS client:
1. initialized a connection to the NeWS server.
2. defined (or extended) his own protocol by defining specific NeWS procedures.
3. then, talked to and from the server only in this newly defined protocol.
Actually, a client did not talk naked NeWS but used a big library (written in NeWS, more than 30000 lines of NeWS source code, and loaded into the server at server initialization time) called The News Toolkit (or TNT). TNT code handled connection initiation and termination, global selection processing, keyboard maps, and provided an object extension to NeWS. The initialization of the NeWS server took more than 10 seconds. TNT provided an OpenLook compliant widget toolkit (mostly running in the server).
NeWS is a superset of PostScript. I assume you are familiar of most PostScript ideas (it is a stack language, and uses several almost independent stacks, including a call stack, an operator stack, a graphic state stack, a message sent stack -for object oriented programming support- and a dictionnary stack. A dictionnary hold variable bindings; it is a finite set of name (or key) to value bindings). I also assume you know some basics of window s
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NeWS was a great thing from Sun (it is a dead Sun product; in SunOS5.3, coming out FCS in december 1993, there is no more NeWS, just an X11R5 server with Display Postscript) . NeWS means Network extensible Window System (or Server). Actually, Sun's window server was a mixture of NeWS and X11R4, but these can be almost viewed as 2 different servers sharing common devices (mouse, keyboard, screen). More precisely, the X11 server was a special NeWS lightweight process (see below). NeWS and X11 had different ports and different protocols. I am talking of the latest NeWS server (in Openwin3). Integrating NeWS and X11 was a difficult problem to Sun, and they did not succeed perfectly on it.The NeWS3 reference manual has part number 800-6736-10 from SunSoft (september 1991). The NeWS Toolkit 3 reference manual has part number 800-6319-10.
The key idea of NeWS (and you already know it) was that the window server was programmable. So a typical NeWS client:
1. initialized a connection to the NeWS server.
2. defined (or extended) his own protocol by defining specific NeWS procedures.
3. then, talked to and from the server only in this newly defined protocol.
Actually, a client did not talk naked NeWS but used a big library (written in NeWS, more than 30000 lines of NeWS source code, and loaded into the server at server initialization time) called The News Toolkit (or TNT). TNT code handled connection initiation and termination, global selection processing, keyboard maps, and provided an object extension to NeWS. The initialization of the NeWS server took more than 10 seconds. TNT provided an OpenLook compliant widget toolkit (mostly running in the server).
NeWS is a superset of PostScript. I assume you are familiar of most PostScript ideas (it is a stack language, and uses several almost independent stacks, including a call stack, an operator stack, a graphic state stack, a message sent stack -for object oriented programming support- and a dictionnary stack. A dictionnary hold variable bindings; it is a finite set of name (or key) to value bindings). I also assume you know some basics of window s