Jump to page content

Components

Caveat

If, from reading these notes, you conclude that I am off my rocker, you won’t be the first, and you may even be right.

No doubt there is a dozen and one reasons why none of this would ever work, but perhaps somewhere deep down there is a tiny fragment that could be used for something.

Session Manager
Responsible for creating and closing user logon sessions and granting permissions to user processes on demand.
Desktop Manager
Responsible for launching all the desktop environment processes within new logon sessions and despatching desktop-level events to the relevant processes according to the configured bindings. Local to each user’s desktop session. The Desktop Manager is also the target of requests to launch files, URLs and applications.
Window Manager
An abstract facility with interchangeable concrete implementations. Responsible for displaying the user’s windows. Draws window borders and title bars and handles windowing tasks such as move, resize, maximise and restore, minimise, zoom (size to fit), collapse and expand, tile, cascade, dock, iconise and move to back according to its behavioural model. Issues change events to all registered listeners and accepts change commands from registered processes (e.g. taskbar, dock, application menu). Third-party window managers will each provide a separate model, allowing a variety of behavioural choices such as RISC OS, classic Mac OS (where each application has a dedicated layer containing its windows) and AmigaOS as well as models such as a tiling window manager. Ideal behaviour is achieved in conjunction with a compatible theme.
Log Manager
Responsible for storing and retrieving both system and application log entries.