Fwd: [Freerdp-devel] WinPR: Windows Portable Runtime

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

FYI

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Marc-André Moreau <marcandre.moreau at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, May 25, 2012 at 3:04 AM
Subject: [Freerdp-devel] WinPR: Windows Portable Runtime
To: freerdp-devel <freerdp-devel at lists.sourceforge.net>


Dear FreeRDP community,

I have an announcement to make regarding a new spin-off project which I've
been preparing for a while. Please read as this will set the tone of future
development :) You can find most current WinPR development work on the
winpr branch: https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP/tree/winpr

WinPR is a spin-off project of FreeRDP which aims at providing a portable
implementation of important portions of the Windows API. Just like FreeRDP,
WinPR is released under the Apache license. Unlike Wine, WinPR does not
provide binary compatibility, and does not require applications to be built
for Windows. Instead, WinPR provides API compatibility for applications
targeting non-Windows environments. When on Windows, the original native
API is being used instead of the equivalent WinPR implementation, without
having to modify the code using it.

WinPR is the result of long and thoughtful process that came up after years
of FreeRDP development. RDP, as you know, is a protocol designed by
Microsoft and is primarily “Windows to Windows”. In many instances,
protocol messages rely heavily on Windows-specific APIs which have no
direct equivalent on other operating systems. For instance, core graphical
messages are based on GDI, network level authentication makes use of the
Microsoft SSPI authentication modules (CredSSP, NTLM), and terminal server
gateway makes use of both SSPI and MSRPC. That’s not even mentioning all
the effort that went into mapping keyboard systems and time zones.
Developing FreeRDP is in many ways all about implementing Windows APIs
outside of Windows.

Immense efforts have gone into the implementation of such features, to the
point where they begin having value outside of FreeRDP itself. At this
point, one of the most valuable part of WinPR is the set of SSPI modules.
Various NTLM implementations exist, all with different interfaces, but the
WinPR implementation is a direct replacement of the original. This is an
advantage because the API is already well documented, with expected inputs
and outputs. FreeRDP can also optionally build against the native SSPI
modules when on Windows. Making this code easily reusable to any one means
that application developers now have an easy way of porting their
applications to make use of the Windows authentication architecture.

WinPR is also a response to a recurrent problem in FreeRDP development: the
proliferation of custom helpers and utility functions. While those are
useful, they often need to be modified and updated to meet new
requirements, causing frequent API changes. Breaking the API regularly
obviously makes a lot of developers unhappy. By choosing to implement an
existing and mature API, we can effectively get rid of the core of the
problem. If a certain API has been used for years and it fits the needs of
most people, you are less likely to need to break it yourself.

Besides the argument of API stability, there is another huge advantage in
using the Windows API over custom utility functions: the ability to easily
share code with other projects that aim at implementing the same API. For
instance, the SSPI modules currently developed in WinPR are of high
interest to the ReactOS project. If the code was filled with custom utility
functions, it would be much harder to use outside of FreeRDP, hindering
such collaboration opportunities. For instance, instead of wrapping calls
to MultiByteToWideChar() in a custom unicode conversion utility, we can use
MultiByteToWideChar() as the utility function and provide an implementation
on non-Windows systems.

As a general rule in WinPR, if a utility function can be replaced by a part
of the Windows API, then the Windows API will have precedence. Otherwise, a
utility method can be used, keeping in mind the downsides of it.

WinPR is also designed to be as modular as possible, using the MinWin
architecture as a reference. MinWin is a refactoring effort of the Windows
API which is more cleaner and comprehensive than the original. The API has
been separated into logical sets, each with a DLL. Not a lot of
documentation is available online about MinWin, but one can find its
structure in the MSDN article “Windows API Sets”:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh802935/

Just like MinWin, WinPR aims at being minimalistic and modular, such that
one can have fine grained control over what is to be used. For projects
making use of only a small amounts of WinPR, it should be possible to
depend only on the minimum required.

At last, why not simply use Wine or code from other projects like ReactOS
or Samba? In all of these cases, there are both licensing and architectural
problems which make it fairly hard for us to use in FreeRDP. For instance,
Wine provides binary compatibility, and it’s not easy for a native Linux
application to make use of parts of it without being built for Windows.
Samba has an interesting MSRPC implementation, but it’s a fairly big
dependency, without counting the fact that we can forget about portability
on mobile platforms like Android and iOS. Unfortunately, none of these
provide a highly portable implementation of the Windows API in the way we
would like and under a license which is suitable to us, justifying the
existence of WinPR.

Through WinPR, investment done in FreeRDP development will take a new life
and become even more valuable. We will open new doors to even higher levels
of interoperability. We will foster collaboration with other projects
following similar goals and reach new heights at an increasingly faster
pace. Stay tuned, you will be amazed!
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-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)