Strangely enough, I've done this before...several years back I had a swiki running on Xvnc. You're right, it is slow. :) Still it would be pretty cool just to use Squeak alone, if possible.
If not, and you have the bandwidth to support it, give VNC a try. VNC used to be called a frame-buffer protocol, and for things that don't update their contents frequently it is usable even over relatively slow connections. But I believe that Morphic may have enough updates going on in the background that this approach would be unusable over a slow connection. It's easy enough to find out, anyway.
For the more ambitious, try implementing the VNC server protocol in Squeak.
- les
On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Kevin Fisher wrote:
Strangely enough, I've done this before...several years back I had a swiki running on Xvnc. You're right, it is slow. :)
I found it quite usable over a ISDN line - 8 bit deep, hextile coding. Not for working, but to administer Swikis it's sufficient.
-- Bert
On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Kevin Fisher wrote:
Strangely enough, I've done this before...several years back I had a swiki running on Xvnc. You're right, it is slow. :)
I found it quite usable over a ISDN line - 8 bit deep, hextile coding. Not for working, but to administer Swikis it's sufficient.
Low level DSL works fine too. I have a little problem with display updating and 8bit is *key*.
Stephan Pair (I think) did some work on VNC serving from Squeak. On the Swiki there's a page where I and others talk about VNC vs. a Nebraska like design.
I still think that putting VNC in at the BitBLT level has good speed possibilities, especially with a custom client. One thing that makes a *big* difference, according to the VNC papers and intuition, is update regions. The more you know about what *needs* updating, and what you can avoid, the better. Er.. maybe the BitBLT level idea isn't for this point (it more relevant for seamlessness).
ANYWAY...(hey, daylight savings; I'm groggy). A Squeak VNC server with a custom client (or, heck, prolly even the regular clients) could do pretty well for normal ui.
The big advantage over Nebraska is the possibility of using very small, ultra thin, "dumb" clients.
Cheers, Bijan Parsia.
-----Original Message----- From: Bijan Parsia [mailto:bparsia@email.unc.edu] Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 12:25 PM To: squeak@cs.uiuc.edu Subject: Re: Dumb question about headless & Nebraska
On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Kevin Fisher wrote:
Strangely enough, I've done this before...several years back I had a swiki running on Xvnc. You're right, it is slow. :)
I found it quite usable over a ISDN line - 8 bit deep, hextile
coding. Not
for working, but to administer Swikis it's sufficient.
Low level DSL works fine too. I have a little problem with display updating and 8bit is *key*.
Stephan Pair (I think) did some work on VNC serving from Squeak. On the Swiki there's a page where I and others talk about VNC vs. a Nebraska like design.
Yes, I implemented the basic protocol and hooked in at the BitBlt level to successfully get the display on a VNC client. However, I didn't implement any of the compression algorithms in VNC, and the bit twizzling that was required on the Squeak side was a tremendous load on Squeak...so I think you would have to implement the compression algorithms, write some primitives to get a speed boost, and play around with where the BitBlt hooks are, and how often you are generating updates (should be driven by the connection speed).
But, I think it's doable, and I think a protocol like VNC has certain advantages over protocols like X or Nebraska, particularly as bandwidth becomes less of an issue in coming years.
I like the all Squeak nature of Nebraska...it would be nice to have a Squeak VNC client to go with a server.
- Stephen
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Bert Freudenberg -
Bijan Parsia -
Kevin Fisher -
Stephen Pair