Subject: Re: NeWS wanted

From: [email-masked] (Don Hopkins)
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 87 17:52:14 EST

Date: Fri, 24 Apr 87 09:28:30 est
From: Bob Sutterfield <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re:  NeWS wanted
Cc: [email-masked]

>	From: Dongwook Shin <[email-masked]>
>
>	... Though Sunview is faster than any other window system on
>	SUN hardware, its capability is slightly limited and it is not
>	a standard on UNIX.

I don't know about your application environment (a Prolog window
system?!), but in a general-purpose UNIX edit/compile/link/debug sort
of a development cycle (like I live in), I find that X performs far
better than Sunview.  Especially in a hardware-constrained system,
like a Sun-3/50 with just enough memory (4Mb), or with an overloaded
ND server, I find that paging and swapping loads bog down Sunview to
where it sometimes becomes hardly usable.  On a Sun-2/120 (also 4Mb)
the scarce CPU cycles burned just doing screen lock contention in
Sunview became really noticeable once I moved to X.

If the hardware constraint is network bandwidth (not a problem here
yet), you may find that window protocol packet transmission may become
your biggest problem, but only when the clients are elsewhere than the
server.  Gosling claims that NeWS' Postscript protocols are more
informationally-dense, but I have yet to see any real numbers on how
much net traffic that might save in various application environments.

In a server based system (like X) each window that corresponds to a
client on another machine uses CPU, memory, and disk I/O channel
resources on that host, some amount of network bandwidth, and hardly
any of my workstation.  All in all, it feels much better.

We're still waiting for our NeWS distribution, so I can't comment on
that system personally.

>	So, we are going to work with NeWS or X window.  Would you
>	inform me of where I can get it and how much it is?

Get NeWS information from your friendly neighborhood Sun sales rep.
How much it costs depends upon who you are and whether you want
sources.  Get X from zap.mit.edu (18.72.0.126), and ask about it at
[email-masked].  It's free (Thanks, DEC!).
------
 Bob Sutterfield, Department of Computer and Information Science
 The Ohio State University; 2036 Neil Ave. Columbus OH USA 43210-1277
 bob@ohio-state.{arpa,csnet} or ...!cb{osgd,att}!osu-eddie!bob
 (614)292-7348 (office) or -0915 (operators) or -7325 (answering machine)