Consistent Windowing Interfaces in Distributed Heterogeneous Environments
Daniel Owen, Alasdair Rawsthorne · 1999
The majority of windowing systems provide a single, unique “look and feel” which applications must assume. Users of multi-platform environments are forced to accept that applications appear and behave differently depending on the platform. This paper describes DHE-Win, an open distributed software architecture that allows users, even in heterogeneous environments, to control the appearance and behaviour of applications. DHE-Win allows users of multi-platform environments to benefit from applications having a consistent appearance and behaviour. Furthermore, it is shown that DHE-Win architecture is radically simpler to implement than existing windowing toolkits, thanks to its highly modular structure and separation of policy and mechanism.