October 13, 2009
Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:53:32 -0400, Adam D. Ruppe thusly wrote:

> In addition to GUI components, I also want to support local file and sound access, along with a few other things. It sucks when you are using an X program and it decides to blare sound out of your home computer when you are using the app from your work computer!
> 
> Or it is a real pain in the ass to have to save the file in X, then scp it over to open it in a local program.
> 
> These things should Just Work, and it isn't hard to implement, so I'll be setting that up too.

Nomachine NX does pretty much what you are describing here. It is not equivalent technically but very similar and backwards compatible.
October 13, 2009
"David Gileadi" <foo@bar.com> wrote in message news:hb24km$pm8$1@digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Video game developers don't make multiplayer games by sending a compressed video stream of the fully-rendered frame - they know that would be unusable. Instead, they just send the minimum higher-level information that's actually needed, like "PlayerA changed direction 72 degrees" (over-simplification, of course). And they send it to a client that'll never insist on crap like interpreted JS or open-for-interpretation standards. And when there's a technology that's inadequate for their needs, like TCP, they make a proper replacement instead of hacking in a half-assed "solution" on top of the offender, TCP. And it works great even though those programs have visuals that are *far* more complex than a typical GUI app. So why can't a windowing toolkit be extended to do the same? And do so *without* building it on top such warped, crumbling, mis-engineered foundations as (X)HTML, Ajax, etc.?
>
> This is generally true, although see OnLive (http://www.onlive.com/).  I hear it works better than you'd expect, but don't have much interest in actually trying it.

Yea, I've heard of that. I'm extremely skeptical though. Even at *absolute* best, I still can't imagine it having less lag than one of those laggy HDTVs, which I already consider entirely inadequate for gaming. Plus they'd essentially have to have a whole high-end gaming rig (plus all the higher-end-than-usual video-capture/compression and network needs) for each simultaneous user, which I'd imagine would either make the subscription fee absurdly high, lead to 90's-AOL-style too-many-connection issues, or send them right into bankruptcy. It's just unnecessary bandwidth/latency bloat.


October 13, 2009
Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:09:11 -0400, Nick Sabalausky thusly wrote:
> A different branch of the this topic started taking about (or rather, bashing on) web-apps-being-used-as-desktop-apps, and I mentioned I felt that was ass-backwards and that the focus should be the other way around: making desktop apps work on the web.
> 
[snip]

> And do so *without* building it on
> top such warped, crumbling, mis-engineered foundations as (X)HTML, Ajax,
> etc.?

You have probably lived under a rock these days. This is the way the world is moving. If something can be made Web 2.0 compatible, it is also what will happen. A new platform might come up in 201x or 202x, but nowadays the best we have got is Web 2.0. Ever used twitter, facebook, google wave (or any google's services) etc. ? Large part of the online enterprises have already jumped on the wagon, not only early adopters. Modern browsers such as opera 10, firefox 3.5, safari, and chrome already support the latest standards.
October 13, 2009
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:33:54 +0200, Ary Borenszweig thusly wrote:

> language_fan wrote:
>  > "Practical" languages
>> have lots of boiler-plate, and I can easily generate hundreds of lines of code with a couple of key combinations or mouse clicks.
> 
> Can you give some examples? I can only think of some that generate some lines of code, not hundreds.

For instance simple things like setters and getters for an aggregate class easily generate tens of lines of code (well, not only code lines, but also other kinds of editable lines). Like lutger said, all kinds of transformations also come in mind in this context. There could be even ORM mapping utilities which generate all the code for accessing the database structures.
October 13, 2009
"language_fan" <foo@bar.com.invalid> wrote in message news:hb2ov1$1jd8$3@digitalmars.com...
> Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:09:11 -0400, Nick Sabalausky thusly wrote:
>> A different branch of the this topic started taking about (or rather, bashing on) web-apps-being-used-as-desktop-apps, and I mentioned I felt that was ass-backwards and that the focus should be the other way around: making desktop apps work on the web.
>>
> [snip]
>
>> And do so *without* building it on
>> top such warped, crumbling, mis-engineered foundations as (X)HTML, Ajax,
>> etc.?
>
> You have probably lived under a rock these days. This is the way the world is moving. If something can be made Web 2.0 compatible, it is also what will happen. A new platform might come up in 201x or 202x, but nowadays the best we have got is Web 2.0. Ever used twitter, facebook, google wave (or any google's services) etc. ? Large part of the online enterprises have already jumped on the wagon, not only early adopters. Modern browsers such as opera 10, firefox 3.5, safari, and chrome already support the latest standards.

You're misunderstanding me.  All of that is stuff that is either A. made for the web using web technologies and then brought to the desktop, still using those god-awful web technologies (twitter, facebook, anything flex), or B. started on the desktop and then completely reimplemented for the web using those same web technologies (google's stuff). But what I'm talking about is taking desktop apps made using nice solid desktop app technologies and making them internet-accessible without ever even touching crap like DHTML, Flash, or even HTTP.


October 13, 2009
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator@gmail.com> wrote in message news:mailman.179.1255391198.20261.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
>
> My DWS project aims to work up on a widget level. It isn't quite as
> visually
> fancy as what you are describing (though it could grow into it later), but
> works on a high enough level of abstraction to be fast - and cross
> platform.
>

Here's another thought I've had that I forgot to mention before. Just tossing it out there, don't know if you've looked into it or not: Instead of (or, better yet, in addition to) a special network-GUI toolkit, what about a server (kind of like a modified version of remote desktop) that actually queries the OS to find out about all the GUIs running on the system, and details about all their controls, relays that info to the client to reproduce, and accepts input back from the client like a softwareKVM would?

It probably wouldn't work quite as well as a special network-GUI toolkit (it would probably have to detect and handle Win32/GTK/Delphi apps seperately, it probably wouldn't be able to do everything 100%, and it wouldn't be able to do any of the "smart" client tricks you have up your sleeve), but it would allow for at least some basic compatibility with apps that weren't specifically coded for a special network-GUI toolkit.

Regarding the technical feasability of gaining information on all the controls of the running processes, I could swear I've seen some Windows program (some dev tool IIRC) that was able to detect that stuff from Win32 and Delphi apps, although I have no recoloction what what in the world that program was... I have no idea as to the feasability on Mac or Unix.


October 13, 2009
language_fan wrote:
> Lucky you. Couple of friends of mine chose the 'data cabling' option from the electrical contractor for their new homes (maybe 2-3 years ago) when they were under construction. The rails on the wall were equipped with RJ11 connectors! Totally useless for LAN, but ok for phone cables and thus xDSL.

What my electrical contractor did was install Cat 3, daisy chain them together, run them through the same holes as the AC wiring, have them touching the heating ducts, sharp bends, cable so cheap the insulation was already cracking on it, etc. He did everything wrong.

But that probably wouldn't be a problem today.

> Another note -- I would use virtualization these days when several OSs are needed.

I tried that and gave up on it:

1. virtual box wouldn't work, until I downloaded the sun version

2. upgrading Ubuntu cause them to all cease functioning
October 14, 2009
Hello Yigal,

> On 13/10/2009 07:07, Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> Yigal Chripun wrote:
>> 
>>> regarding working on a remote machine:
>>> you can mount a remote file system through ssh and work localy on
>>> that
>>> remoted filesystem.
>> I do that sometimes, but it's a problem when trying to run the
>> compiler/debugger, as they need to run on the remote machine, not
>> just locally <g>.
>> 
> Eclipse has integration for that. it can execute remote commands and
> has remote debugging - the local eclipse debugger UI speaks with a
> remote gdb session. and if you really prefer command-line, you can
> always use the terminal view.
> 

Darn I so want this. Do you have links? Does the GDB thing work from from a Win client and a running GDB on Linux?


October 14, 2009
On 14/10/2009 03:54, BCS wrote:
> Hello Yigal,
>
>> On 13/10/2009 07:07, Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>>> Yigal Chripun wrote:
>>>
>>>> regarding working on a remote machine:
>>>> you can mount a remote file system through ssh and work localy on
>>>> that
>>>> remoted filesystem.
>>> I do that sometimes, but it's a problem when trying to run the
>>> compiler/debugger, as they need to run on the remote machine, not
>>> just locally <g>.
>>>
>> Eclipse has integration for that. it can execute remote commands and
>> has remote debugging - the local eclipse debugger UI speaks with a
>> remote gdb session. and if you really prefer command-line, you can
>> always use the terminal view.
>>
>
> Darn I so want this. Do you have links? Does the GDB thing work from
> from a Win client and a running GDB on Linux?
>
>

http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/
October 15, 2009
Sorry for the slow reply here; I keep getting sidetracked.

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 08:05:06PM -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> One cool thing is combining sshfs with autofs. That way the connection is automatically made when you first open a dir. For example, if I write:

That looks cool. I'll have to look into it.

> What are the issues that you encountered?

My big problem is just one of speed. I've been able to work around some of it by changing my editor config (moving vim's swap file to a local dir made the biggest difference), but there is still an annoying noticeable lag when reading and writing the file.

I often edit files in a rapid way: make a small change, save, recompile+run or refresh the page if a web app - I want to see the changes as instantly as possible.

The sshfs lag isn't much, but it adds up quickly when doing several small changes. I find that if any given task takes hours, I can be very patient, but if it takes milliseconds, I get annoyed easily!

> My problems invariably involve
> suspending the laptop to RAM or changing wireless connections, to then
> find sshfs blocked.

I haven't encountered that, but I also work from my desktop. (Even when
on my laptop, I tend to run most programs remotely from the desktop - this
is one of the driving forces behind my "D Windowing System" project described
in the other thread. (That, and I just want an easy, simple API for my common
tasks in D - kill two birds with one stone, I figure.)

> 
> Andrei

-- 
Adam D. Ruppe
http://arsdnet.net