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Cy/VOS concepts and architecture

Author: Telcontar
See also: An introduction to Cy/VOS, Cy/VOS structure and components

Unlike Cy/VOS structure and components, this page sets out to outline the architecture of and various concepts of Cy/VOS and direct the reader to further text on the subject. Items will be added to the page incrementally as time and memory permits.

Application interaction

The Cy/VOS message passing model provides for all aspects of program communication, from client-server interaction that supports the kernel architecture to high-level application interaction and Internet Protocol networking.

System configuration

System configuration will be a layered system to strongly separate the different aspects of configuring a system; settings will be inherited down the layers. System configuration will be provided by the configuration server.

Filing

Cy/VOS file system access will be provided through a virtual file system API, providing an impartial superset of the file sytems found on other platforms. Two official file systems are proposed, a BeFS-like conventional file system and transactional database system. For present notes on this please see Plan.FileSystem.

User interface

Unlike tradition user interface paradigms which tie programs to a single interface model, Cy/VOS will recommend a fundamental core/UI split by way of Universal Interface, by which programs request interaction through a semantic API. This will be sufficient to satisfy a generic rendition of the interaction for a variety of interfaces such as graphical, speech and console, although hint instructions and dedicated scripting can be used to improve the appearance and behaviour of the program over the standard heuristics.

Graphical user interface

The graphical interface is LayerGUI, a layered system providing hardware agnosticism and substantial flexibility. The graphical interface will be programmed in Interface PostScript to provide programmatic power and scalable graphics.

The application model

The Cy/VOS application model is an overview of the structure of a standard Cy/VOS application and its basic housekeeping functionality.