[Circle-dev] Tab-complete in frontends

[Paul LeoNerd Evans]

On Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:15:04 +0000
Alastair Douglas <alastair.douglas at gmail.com> wrote:

> This conversation is circling the word 'cache', which makes the thin,
> dumb client no longer a) thin or b) dumb.
> 
> How much thin and dumbness are we prepared to sacrifice?

I'd like to weigh in in agreement of the other two so far; and say we've
never once said this is a "thin" client.

A "thin" client has no idea of the semantic idea of the pictures/words it
is presenting. Think xterm+ssh, or vncviewer. The server lays out all of
the view; either e.g. irssi within the user's sshd session, or Xvnc.

By contrast, Circle does the exact opposite. The circle-be deals -only-
with the semantic, not with the layout view. It pushes application-level
events to the frontend viewer program, which then draws them how it sees
fit.

It also caches a lot of things - consider switching tabs in your typical
ssh-screen-irssi, or vncviewer-Xvnc-Xchat arrangement. Flip 10 times
between two tabs, and 10 times that content has to traverse the network.
By contrast, those tabs exist natively as real (in this case) GTK tabs in
the local viewer. No network traffic is created when flipping tabs,
scrolling, copy/pasting, typing text,.... I.e. no network is required for
operations on the view of the data. Only on the semantic model of it;
namely, the content.

It is this very distinction as the reason for this project in the first
place; the suggestion of a "thin" client never once occurred.

As to the specifics of tab-complete - One of the reasons for the frontend
to be more intelligent, is to reduce roundtrips or network usage. Per-key
roundtrips a.la. ssh or vnc are the sorts of things we want to avoid.
Having tab-complete done in the frontend, in whatever form, would help
this.

-- 
Paul "LeoNerd" Evans

leonerd at leonerd.org.uk
ICQ# 4135350       |  Registered Linux# 179460
http://www.leonerd.org.uk/
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