WIN: A Persistent Window Management System
Quintin Cutts, Chris Marlin · 2004
WIN is a persistent window management system written in Napier88, a strongly typed persistent language developed at the University of St Andrews. The system treats windows as independent objects which may be displayed by a window manager or retained in a persistent store as required. Because windows are not tightly bound to specific window managers, they may be reused: windows may outlive a particular invocation of the WIN system. Window managers themselves run within windows and so they may be nested to arbitrary depth. This enables a hierarchical arrangement of windows, where a window may in turn be organised by a window manager which itself displays subwindows. The benefits of this approach are that applications which run within windows may be easily structured, and that user interface tools such as lightbuttons, menus and sliders are treated uniformly as windows. This document should be referenced as: “WIN: A Persistent Window Management System Universities of St Andrews and Glasgow, PPRR-73-89”