[interfacekit] My own little disappearance and reappearance of layers

[DarkWyrm <bpmagic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry that I haven't done anything since Friday - I've been out-of-town (and, 
thus, offline) since right after I got home from school on Friday.

>I've gone and dug up most everything in the way of docs that you've 
>posted thus far -- and it's a lot to digest!  I need to cogitate on this 
>stuff a bit more -- fit it together with what I've been thinking about 
>-- but I have a couple of questions.
I've forgotten a lot of what I wrote, so I'm going to have to reread my own 
docs. Good thing I wasn't planning anything this afternoon! ;)

>I'm unclear on exactly the role layers play and what their relationship 
>to server windows is.  It *sounds* like the layer does the drawing and 
>holds information about the client-side window and the server window 
>just maintains some metrics  regarding the window's placement and, of 
>course, a reference to the current decorator.  Is that about right?  Is 
>there a 1:1 relationships of layers to windows?  If so, is there a 
>logical reason why these are two separate classes?  Maybe  I'm being 
>thrown off by the "Layer" name -- I'm not really groking the abstraction 
>it represents:  a layer of *what*?
>
>Something I wanted to note, I remembered reading in the news lists some 
>time ago that the desktop is nothing more than a window whose client 
>area is -- you guessed it -- the size of the desktop.  I recall the post 
>stating that if you could hunt the window down and kill it, you'd have a 
>no-man's land of random crap in video memory as your background.  I've 
>never tried it, but it's food for thought.  The question that comes to 
>mind for me is this:  is there one of these screen-sized windows for 
>each workspace, or just one representing the desktop generally?  Seems 
>to me that since each workspace can have a different resolution, a 
>desktop-window-per-workspace policy might simplify things a bit.
It sounds like I need to write some more stuff on this. I'll see if I can 
answer your questions and make things a little clearer for us all some time 
relatively soon. Expect a good-sized post in the next day or two.

>Couple of things I want to re-iterate.  None of this prototyping work 
>needs to be production quality.  It should only be a proving ground for 
>ideas.  Also, we need to heavily document our work.  Two reasons for 
>this:  First, so that new people coming onto the project can come up to 
>speed quickly.  Second, to ease maintainance and extension down the 
>road.  The project at work which has had me on the rack the last several 
>weeks is poorly designed, but worse, it's poorly documented.  Figuring 
>out how systems work together, or even what's being used and what is 
>just baggage from previous versions that no longer serves a purpose has 
>been a certifiable *nightmare*.  I don't want to see us do this to 
>ourselves. =P
>
>Anyway, enough manager-mode, I'm goin' to bed.
>
>e
I posted the prototype code of mine. The objects are not included, but there 
is a binary and the sources. It's only got scarce comments, but it's 
relatively simple code at this point, so things should remain pretty 
understandable. It would be better commented, but I had saved that for when I 
thought it would be worth uploading (not too far down the road). Proof-of-
concept, but that's about it.

http://bephotomagic.virtualave.net/obapp_server.zip

--DW

• Follow-Ups:
  • [interfacekit] AtheOS Layers, Windows, and Bitmaps (Oh my!)
    • From: DarkWyrm

• References:
  • [interfacekit] Re: Structure of the app_server
    • From: Erik Jakowatz

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[interfacekit] My own little disappearance and reappearance of layers