Windowing system

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

[edit] List of windowing systems

8½ and rio for Plan 9
GEM
Fresco/Berlin
FBUI
NEXTSTEP
Qtopia
Quartz Compositor for Mac OS X
X Window System (free-software, de-facto standard on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems)
Xynth
Y Window System
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.
ManaGeR (MGR)
Twin (Text WINdows)
web windowing systems
- 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
- WinLIKE