iPedia Free Information Center

Information about Windowing Systems

A windowing system (or window system) is a graphical user interface (GUI) which implements windows as one of its primary metaphors. It is normally one part of a larger desktop environment.

From a programmer's point of view, a windowing system implements graphical primitives such as rendering fonts or drawing a line on the screen, effectively providing an abstraction of the graphics hardware.

A windowing system enables the computer user to work with several programs at the same time. Each program runs in its own window, which is an area of the screen, typically a rectangle. Most windowing systems allow windows to overlap, and provide means for the user to perform standard operations such as moving/resizing a window, sending a window to the foreground/background and minimizing/maximizing a window.

Some windowing systems, like the X Window System, have advanced capabilities such as network transparency, allowing the user to display graphical applications running on a remote machine. Further, the X Window System does not implement any specific policy regarding the look and feel of the graphical user interfaces, leaving that to the X window managers, widget toolkits and desktop environments.

List of windowing systems

POSIX-compatible windowing systems

Other

Operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS (version 9 and earlier), and Palm OS, contain a windowing system which is integrated with the OS. Windows Vista integrates the Desktop Window Manager.

Web windowing systems

  • Dojo
  • TIBCO General Interface an open source Ajax Rich Internet Application Toolkit with more than 100 components for making Ajax apps with the paradigms of a windowing system's GUI
  • WebWM, Web Window Manager

See also

graphical user interface (GUI) is a type of user interface which allows people to interact with a computer and computer-controlled devices which employ graphical icons, visual indicators or special graphical elements called "widgets", along with text, labels or text
..... Click the link for more information.
window is a visual area, usually rectangular in shape, containing some kind of user interface, displaying the output of and allowing input for one of a number of simultaneously running computer processes.
..... Click the link for more information.
An Interface metaphor is a set of user interface visuals, actions and procedures that exploit specific knowledge that users already have of other domains. The purpose of the interface metaphor is to give the user instantaneous knowledge about how to interact with the user interface.
..... Click the link for more information.
In graphical computing, a desktop environment (DE, sometimes desktop manager) offers a graphical user interface (GUI) to the computer. The name is derived from the desktop metaphor used by most of these interfaces, as opposed to the earlier, textual command line
..... Click the link for more information.
programmer or software developer is someone who programs computers, that is, one who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software.
..... Click the link for more information.
This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject.
Please help recruit one or [ improve this article] yourself. See the talk page for details.
..... Click the link for more information.
X Window System (commonly X11 or X) is a display protocol which provides windowing on bitmap displays. It provides the standard toolkit and protocol to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on Unix-like operating systems and OpenVMS, and has been ported to all other
..... Click the link for more information.
Network Transparency in its most general sense refers to the ability of a protocol to transmit data over the network in a manner which is transparent to those using the applications that are using the protocol.
..... Click the link for more information.
A remote computer is a computer to which a user does not have physical access, but which he or she can access/manipulate via some kind of network from a local computer (one which the user does have physical access to).
..... Click the link for more information.
An X window manager is software that controls the placement and appearance of windows under the X Window System, a windowing system mainly used on Unix-like systems.
..... Click the link for more information.
A widget toolkit, widget library, or GUI toolkit is a set of generic widgets for use in designing graphical user interfaces. Widgets that are part of a toolkit typically adhere to a unified design specification, including aesthetics and possibly an application
..... Click the link for more information.
In graphical computing, a desktop environment (DE, sometimes desktop manager) offers a graphical user interface (GUI) to the computer. The name is derived from the desktop metaphor used by most of these interfaces, as opposed to the earlier, textual command line
..... Click the link for more information.
rio is Plan 9 from Bell Labs's windowing system.

Overview

Many of its features embody key Plan 9 design concepts:
  • Each window runs in its own private namespace.
  • It exports a file system interface to running applications.

..... Click the link for more information.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system, primarily used as a research vehicle. It was developed as the research successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002.
..... Click the link for more information.
In computing, Fresco (formerly known as Berlin) is a windowing system. It is intended as a replacement for the X Window System. As of July 11, 2007, the last activity in the project's CVS repository was dated June 11, 2004.
..... Click the link for more information.
FrameBuffer UI (FBUI) is an in-kernel windowing system for Linux (kernel version 2.6.9 only) that sits on top of the framebuffer subsystem. Unlike the X Window System, FBUI comes at very low cost: the entire subsystem is about 50 kilobytes in size.
..... Click the link for more information.
ManaGeR (MGR) is a graphical window system. The MGR server provides a builtin window manager and windowed graphics terminal emulation on color and monochrome bitmap displays.
..... Click the link for more information.
Metisse is a 2.5D windowing system, based on the X Window System. Metisse is available as a window manager for at least Mandriva One 2007[1] and Sabayon Linux. It has many features that set it apart from the traditional 3D "Cube workspace".
..... Click the link for more information.
Qtopia is Trolltech's application platform for Embedded Linux-based PDAs, mobile phones, web pads, and other mobile computing devices.

Qtopia features:
  • Windowing system
  • Synchronization framework
  • Development environment

..... Click the link for more information.
Quartz Compositor is the window server in Mac OS X. It is responsible for presenting and maintaining rasterized, rendered graphics from the rest of the Core Graphics framework and other renderers in the Quartz technologies family.
..... Click the link for more information.
Mac OS X (IPA: /mæk.oʊ.ɛs.tɛn/) is a line of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc., the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently shipping Macintosh computers.
..... Click the link for more information.
Twin (Text WINdows) is a text-mode windowing environment written and maintained by Massimiliano Ghilardi; it draws and manages text windows on a text-mode display, like X11 does for graphical windows.
..... Click the link for more information.
X Window System (commonly X11 or X) is a display protocol which provides windowing on bitmap displays. It provides the standard toolkit and protocol to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on Unix-like operating systems and OpenVMS, and has been ported to all other
..... Click the link for more information.
Xynth is an embedded windowing system, released under LGPL, developed to systems with low resources, is an alternative for X Window System. The goal of the project is to release a soft but portable and powered Window Environment. The source language is C.
..... Click the link for more information.
Y Window System (also known as Y-Windows) is a windowing system, consisting of a window server and a client library for writing applications. It was written by Mark Thomas as the subject of his Master's thesis at Imperial College, London.
..... Click the link for more information.
DM (Display Manager) was the window system used by Apollo Computer Inc. for its Apollo/Domain line of workstations running the AEGIS operating system, later renamed Domain/OS.
..... Click the link for more information.
GEM (Graphical Environment Manager) was a windowing system created by Digital Research, Inc. (DRI) for use with the CP/M operating system on the Intel 8088 and Motorola 68000 microprocessors. Later versions ran over DOS as well.
..... Click the link for more information.
Intuition, and developed almost entirely by RJ Mical. Users may remember the initial releases for their garish blue/orange/white/black palettes, selected for high contrast.
..... Click the link for more information.
NeWS (for Network extensible Window System) was a windowing system developed by Sun Microsystems in the late 1980s. Its primary architect was James Gosling, who subsequently designed Java.
..... Click the link for more information.
Nextstep was the original object-oriented, multitasking operating system that NeXT Computer developed to run on its proprietary NeXT computers ("black boxes"). Nextstep 1.0 was released on September 18, 1989 after several previews starting in 1986. The last version, 3.
..... Click the link for more information.


This article is copied from an article on Wikipedia.org - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. The text was not checked or edited by anyone on our staff. Although the vast majority of the wikipedia encyclopedia articles provide accurate and timely information please do not assume the accuracy of any particular article. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License.
Herod_Archelaus


page counter