Windowing system
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A windowing 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.
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[edit] List of windowing systems
[edit] POSIX-compatible windowing systems
- 8½ and rio for Plan 9
- Fresco/Berlin
- FBUI
- ManaGeR (MGR)
- Metisse
- Qtopia
- Quartz Compositor for Mac OS X
- Twin (Text WINdows)
- X Window System (free-software, de-facto standard on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems)
- Xynth
- Y Window System
[edit] Other
- DM
- GEM
- Intuition
- NeXTSTEP DPS
- Some 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.
[edit] Web windowing systems
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- 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
[edit] See also
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