Dreadnought
Application Browser
The Universal Client(tm)
"Fear God, and dread nought" - Motto of Jackie Fisher - British First Sea Lord, and creator of the dreadnought battleship.
Technical Overview
Dreadnought similar to a web browser, except that instead of displaying documents, it acts as a display for remote applications. Instead of using using HTML to communicate between the server and the browser, it uses a custom messaging system. Dreadnought is a DOIP (Display Over IP) technology.
The way it works is you type a URL like nio://apps.newio.org:22/hello.nio in the browser and Dreadnought makes a call to the server to start (in this case) the
NewI\O
hello application. The application is started and communicates on this same port back and forth to the browser using the messaging system.
Dreadnought (and NIO_lib) currently supports keyboard and mouse events, colors, drawing primatives, fonts, images, sounds, and music. Video is in progress. It works like a web browser does, by downloading resources such as images and sounds. Therefore, the first time it runs it will take some time downloading resources. The resources are cached, so subsequent runs are much faster.
Security
Dreadnought has security similar to Secure Shell (ssh). It has access control, and an encrypted channel.
Platforms
Dreadnought was designed for portability and uses the
cross platform SDL library for rendering. It currently runs on Linux and MS Windows.
License
Dreadnought is released under the
GPL
(GNU Genreal Public License).
Acknowledgments
Bob Pendelton - Font and text routines.
Ryan McGuigan
More Information
E-Mail:
cnystrom@gmail.com
Updated: 02/03/07 ccn
