[interfacekit] Re: PortThief

>Cool!  Unfortunately, I don't really know what to do with it, either.  
>There doesn't seem to be a mechanism which could be used to intercept 
>port data and then pass it along to it's intended target (I briefly 
>looked into this toward the start of the project) -- or maybe you've 
>figured that out?  If so, we can learn an *awful* lot by just watching 
>what goes though a port when we do certain things (like, say, draw a 
>line ;).  Even if you haven't puzzled out the pass-on portion, we might 
>still be able to grok a good deal of what goes on between app_server and 
>friends -- or input_server and app_server.
>
>In fact, I'm getting an idea.  But then again, it would only be useful 
>if we wanted to reverse engineer the app_server protocol -- which I 
>don't think we're really interested in, right?
    Well, this stuff I'm currently working on has to do with screen updates 
and such. I've got a small part of the app_server's interface spec done, and 
this happens to be the next bit which needs researched and written. If we 
want binary compatibility, we're going to need to reverse engineer the 
app_server protocol for BView reasons.
    If I understand things correctly, BViews have the bitmap which is blasted 
to the screen and the app_server (somehow) has access to it. BViews talk to 
the app_server, but the average joe developer sees none of it on the surface 
- the messages are done via various methods, like FillRect, StrokeArc, etc.
    I probably could figure out quite a bit if I understood how to interpret 
data passed in port messages. Understanding this seems to me as something 
pivotal for our team - if we can see what the servers are saying to each 
other, it'd be a cinch, relatively speaking, to duplicate it.

--DW

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