Experience with Flamingo: a distributed, object-oriented user interface system

Abstract

The Flamingo Window Management System is based on a remote method invocation mechanism that provides separate processes running in a heterogeneous, distributed computing environment with complete access to Flamingo's objects and methods. This object-oriented interface has made Flamingo a kernel window manager into which device drivers, graphics libraries, window managers and user interfaces can be dynamically loaded. This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Flamingo's system architecture, and introduces a new architecture which will provide a network-wide object space with object protection, migration, and garbage collection.