Re: L4Re GUI

Hello,

I am the author of DOpE and Nitpicker. If you are interested in the
motivation and purpose behind each of these projects, you might find my
dissertation insightful:

  http://www.genode-labs.com/publications/secure-gui-2009.pdf

DOpE was originally implemented for L4env. Given that L4re is somehow
the evolutionary successor of L4env, I guess the L4re authors kept DOpE
for historic reasons. Maybe it was deemed to be too nice to be tossed
away. But to the best of my knowledge, it is not actively worked on. It
is merely being kept alive.

When Christian Helmuth and me started Genode, we consciously left DOpE
out of the picture. The rationale was that, on the one hand, DOpE offers
too little compared to established toolkits such as Qt4. On the other
hand, DOpE is quite complex and sophisticated. Properly maintaining and
substantially improving it would require a significant investment of
work and energy. We figured that Genode has more important areas to
invest our time in. Hence, we settled on the combination of Nitpicker
and Qt4.

That said, I think that the architectural approach (i.e., server-side
widgets) of DOpE is in many ways superior to today's commodity GUIs.
Also, compared to Qt4, DOpE is extremely light-weight, responsive, and
memory efficient. So one day, I will certainly come back to it. But that
day is not in sight right now.

Best regards
Norman

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs

http://www.genode-labs.com · http://genode.org

Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden
Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth