NeWS Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
NeWS, for Network extensible Window System, was a window system developed by Sun Microsystems in the late 1980s. Its primary architect was James Gosling, who subsequently designed Java.Based on PostScript (PS), NeWS started by modifing the PostScript interpreter to run in a cooperative multitasking fashion. Unlike PostScript in a printer, NeWS would be displaying a number of PS programs at the same time on one screen, so some form of multitasking was required. Contrary to popular belief, NeWS is unrelated to Display PostScript, instead it is a similar product, but generally considered superior because of its clean inclusion of commands to create windows and manage events, and the object system, all of which DPS left up to outside (and often totally different and platform-specific) interfaces.
In addition, NeWS added a complete view hierarchy system, based on viewports known as canvases. Like the view system in most GUIs, it included the concept of a tree of embedded views along which events were passed. It also included a complete model for events (including timers and other "automatic" events), input queues for devices, and other functionality required for full interaction. But by far the most interesting addition was a complete object oriented (OO) programming style with inheritance. This eliminated the need for an external OO language to build a complete application.
Since all of these additions were added as additional PostScript keywords, it was possible to write simple PostScript code that would result in a running, onscreen, interactive program. For instance one of the common examples was an onscreen clock, which required about two pages of PS code.
NeWS also included a library (several actually) of user interface elements (widgets), written in NeWS. These widgets ran all of their behaviour in the NeWS interpreter, and only required communications to an outside program (or more NeWS code) when the widget demanded it. The best example of such a toolkit is TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) which was released by Sun in 1989.
For example, a toggle button's display routine can query the button's state (pressed or not) and change its display accordingly. The button can also react to mouse clicks by changing its state from pressed to not pressed and vice versa. All this can happen in the windowing server without interaction with the client program, and only when the mouse is released on the button will an event be sent off for handling.
This was more sophisticated than a "dumb" X Window System server, which can only report "mouse clicked on button" events to a client, which then has to switch the state, and finally instruct the server to display the new state. If client and server are not on the same machine, these interactions must travel over the network, slowing the feedback loop down unnecessarily.
Several companies licensed NeWS and adapted it for various uses. There were only a few companies committed to this unproven technology. SGI used it to replace their proprietary GL windowing system. The OpenLook version of FrameMaker developed by Frame Technology Corp with funding mainly from Sun Microsystems and NSA at the time was one of the few commercial products successfully run on NeWS. The freely-available X11 was already quite popular, so the first versions of NeWS emulated X11 by translating the calls into NeWS PostScript. Speed problems plus the existence of programs that relied on the exact pixel results of X11 calls, forced Sun to release an X11+NeWS hybrid called Xnews which ran an X server in parallel with the interpreter, which seriously degraded the NeWS interpreter performance and did not really result in a very good X server either. Sun also attempted to emulate the look & feel of OpenLook with a toolkit built on the same Xt (X Intrinsics) base as Motif, called OLIT, so that X programs could be made to look identical. After it was clear that OpenLook had lost out to Motif in popularity, and after Adobe acquired FrameMaker, products on NeWS simply vanished. Most UNIX workstations (including Sun's) now run the X Window System.
The case can be made that a graphics engine where the code can be placed in either the screen engine or the application code needs to be considered as well, from any practical standpoint, Display PostScript offered the same power and flexibility for almost none of the complexity.
There is no doubt that in many ways NeWS had a superior design for thin-networked clients, by moving much of the processing to the display, and separating graphical user interface semantics from client program semantics.
Possible reasons for its failure in the market include:
This is an Article on NeWS. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About NeWS Why did NeWS fail?
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