Why is Screens is taking so long?

Screens Environment has been going since 2002 and still no releases have made the light of day. There is a single reason why Screens has taken so long and why I have no idea when it will be released. Its not because I lack time or interest. Its because of the object storage.

If you look at the object oriented OS projects, none of them have made mainstream because they are not practical enough, too complex, too slow and still stuck in a concept. There are many companies trying to bring object oriented concepts to file systems just like me and just like me are still stuck.

If I was not making the object storage, I would of finished Screens long ago but then again the object storage is such a radical change that Screens would not be the same without it. In fact, the object storage would be the main difference between Screens and other middleware platforms.

I need luck, time and persistence to find a combination that works.

Component Oriented Programming

The difference between component oriented programming and object oriented programming is focus. In object oriented programming the focus is the objects themselves which is why you access methods through objects like this:

CoreObject * object = new CoreObject;

object->rename("My Object");

In component oriented programming the focus is the components and objects are just placeholders for instances like this:

CoreObject * object = CoreObjectNew();

CoreObjectRename(object, "My Object");

It looks like procedural programming but the difference is that it uses objects. One of the reasons object oriented programming has never able to become a file system is because when objects are created, they are stuck in stone in their definition. While their properties can be modified, you cannot add/remove properties. In component oriented programming, an object is just a placeholder where you attach/detach components to objects. Each component has a data definition associated with it. Because of this, when you attach an object to a component, you attach private data of the component to the object. Each component only accesses its private data per object and does not read or write another component data directly but rather uses the API provided by the other components.

That is component oriented programming in a nutshell.