[Lazarus] Remote application

[Michael Schnell]

I understand that there are (at least) two ways to do the remote display.

A) Read the pixels from the graphics driver. This is what VNC does. The 
problem here is, that you don't know when an update is necessary (and 
thus you need to do polling) and that reading the pixels needs a lot of 
performances (get a GDI-handle, read the complete screen memory via the 
bus and then transfer only the pixels that have changed). (In fact some 
time ago I stole this code from VNC, translated it from C to Pascal and 
did a thingy that could transfer a rectangle of the screen via TCP to 
another PC.)

or

B) Hook into the interface between the application and the Windows 
manager. This is what Linux "Remote X" and Windows "Remote Desktop" do. 
VirtualBox (and supposedly VMWare) seems to be able to do do this, too, 
and here I did already see that it is possible to virtualize a single 
program rather than a complete Desktop.



Seemingly NX can do both, depending on the situation.

It's understandable that doing (B) is at least "difficult", when you 
want to attach to a running program, as supposedly a program transfers 
some information when starting and the Window manager needs to know same 
even when it requests a full repaint. But obviously Windows "Remote 
Desktop" can handle this problem decently.

So attaching to an already running program (not the Desktop it runs on) 
using (B) is not that easy :-( . Maybe it's possible to something like 
starting another instance of the program with NX in the way you 
originally described and do some magic within the program itself to meld 
the running instance into the newly started one. (Just raving...)

-Michael