A Clutter Backend For The Wayland Display Server

Wayland, a project by Kristian Høgsberg to create a new display server for Linux that leverages kernel mode-setting, the Graphics Execution Manager, and other newer Linux graphics technologies, continues to mature. Last month Eagle (the Wayland EGL stack) got working DRI2 support (DRI2 was also masterminded by Kristian) and now there's also some work going on within the tool-kit realm. There remains no GTK or Qt back-end for the Wayland Display Server, but one is in development by Kristian for Clutter.

The Clutter Toolkit is nearing a 1.0 status and it uses OpenGL and OpenGL ES for rendering, but the API exposed to the desktop developer is much simpler. Clutter has a Pango font renderer, Cairo graphics rendering, and G-Streamer support. In particular, Clutter has been gaining ground within the Linux mobile area and will likely be used by the Moblin project. Kristian has created his own Clutter repository and as a branch of it is a Wayland back-end for Clutter.

The discussion about widget tool-kits for Wayland can be found in the Wayland Google Group. Kristian also mentioned another developer had written a minimal desktop shell for Wayland. Porting GTK+ to Wayland is still being planned for the future.