| 1 | <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
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| 2 | <html>
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| 3 | <head>
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| 4 | <meta HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html;CHARSET=iso-8859-1">
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| 5 | <meta name="keywords" content="Virtual Screen, Open Source, Software" />
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| 6 | <meta name="description" content="Mouse and Keyboard Sharing" />
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| 7 | <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="synergy.css" media="screen" />
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| 8 | <title>Synergy Developer Documentation</title>
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| 9 | </head>
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| 10 | <body class="main">
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| 11 | <p>
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| 12 | Synergy is reasonably well commented so reading the source code
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| 13 | should be enough to understand particular pieces. See the
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| 14 | <span class="code">doc/PORTING</span>
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| 15 | file in the synergy source code for more high-level information.
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| 16 | </p><p>
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| 17 | </p><h4>How it works</h4><p>
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| 18 | </p><p>
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| 19 | The theory behind synergy is simple: the server captures mouse,
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| 20 | keyboard, clipboard, and screen saver events and forwards them to
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| 21 | one or more clients. If input is directed to the server itself
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| 22 | then the input is delivered normally. In practice, however, many
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| 23 | complications arise.
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| 24 | </p><p>
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| 25 | First, different keyboard mappings can produce different characters.
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| 26 | Synergy attempts to generate the same character on the client as
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| 27 | would've been generated on the server, including appropriate modifier
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| 28 | keys (like Control and Alt). Non-character keys like Shift are also
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| 29 | synthesized if possible. Sometimes the client simply cannot create
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| 30 | the character or doesn't have a corresponding non-character key and
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| 31 | synergy must discard the event. Note that synergy won't necessarily
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| 32 | synthesize an event for the corresponding key on the client's
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| 33 | keyboard. For example, if the client or server can't distinguish
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| 34 | between the left and right shift keys then synergy can't be certain
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| 35 | to synthesize the shift on the same side of the keyboard as the user
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| 36 | pressed.
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| 37 | </p><p>
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| 38 | Second, different systems have different clipboards and clipboard
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| 39 | formats. The X window system has a system-wide selection and
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| 40 | clipboard (and yet other buffers) while Microsoft Windows has only
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| 41 | a system-wide clipboard. Synergy has to choose which of these
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| 42 | buffers correspond to one another. Furthermore, different systems
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| 43 | use different text encodings and line breaks. Synergy mediates and
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| 44 | converts between them.
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| 45 | </p><p>
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| 46 | Finally, there are no standards across operating systems for some
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| 47 | operations that synergy requires. Among these are: intercepting
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| 48 | and synthesizing events; enabling, disabling, starting and stopping
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| 49 | the screen saver; detecting when the screen saver starts; reading
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| 50 | and writing the clipboard(s).
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| 51 | </p><p>
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| 52 | All this means that synergy must be customized to each operating
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| 53 | system (or windowing system in the case of X windows). Synergy
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| 54 | breaks platform differences into two groups. The first includes
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| 55 | the mundane platform dependent things: file system stuff,
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| 56 | multithreading, network I/O, multi-byte and wide character
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| 57 | conversion, time and sleeping, message display and logging, and
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| 58 | running a process detached from a terminal. This code lives in
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| 59 | <span class="code">lib/arch</span>.
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| 60 | </p><p>
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| 61 | The second includes screen and window management handling, user
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| 62 | event handling, event synthesis, the clipboards, and the screen
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| 63 | saver. This code lives in <span class="code">lib/platform</span>.
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| 64 | </p><p>
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| 65 | For both groups, there are particular classes or interfaces that
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| 66 | must be inherited and implemented for each platform. See the
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| 67 | <span class="code">doc/PORTING</span> file in the synergy source
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| 68 | code for more information.
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| 69 | </p><p>
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| 70 | </p><h4>Auto-generated Documentation</h4><p>
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| 71 | </p><p>
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| 72 | Synergy can automatically generate documentation from the comments
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| 73 | in the code using <a target="_top" href="http://www.doxygen.org/">doxygen</a>.
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| 74 | Use <span class="command">make doxygen</span> to build it yourself
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| 75 | from the source code into the <span class="code">doc/doxygen/html</span>
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| 76 | directory.
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| 77 | </p>
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| 78 | </p>
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| 79 | </body>
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| 80 |
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| 81 | </html>
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