Berlin project is a windowing system, designed to provide rich and flexible user interface functionality to applications. Berlin is perceived by many as the logical next step after the X Window System. The project is currently at its development stage.
The differences between Berlin and X are briefly the following:
- The logic is more centered around the server. An application may drive the server to construct complex scenes of windows and controls and to program interactions between them — a sphere which X relegated to application-side GUI toolkits.
- Berlin sports an extensive system of objects that are somewhat abstract and can be combined to achieve complex effects and behaviour, whereas X deals mostly with simple windows, pixmaps and events.
- CORBA interfaces are used for client-server interactions instead of a custom (yet extensible) protocol.
- Deals with the modern concepts in graphical user interfaces — such as alpha blending, anti-aliasing, Unicode text, 3D scenes — in its core
functionality.
- Done away with binding to pixels: all screen objects are set in logical coordinates.
The project's homepage is located at
http://www.berlin-consortium.org.