Server-side Wayland connector
Overview
This crate provides the interfaces and machinery to safely create servers
for the Wayland protocol. It is a rust wrapper around the libwayland-server.so
C library.
The Wayland protocol revolves around the creation of various objects and the exchange
of messages associated to these objects. Whenever a client connects, a Display object
is automatically created in their object space, which they use as a root to create new
objects and bootstrap their state.
Protocol and messages handling model
The protocol being bi-directional, you can send and receive messages. Sending messages is done via methods of Rust objects corresponding to the wayland protocol objects, receiving and handling them is done by providing implementations.
Resources
The protocol and message model is very similar to the one of wayland-client, with the
main difference being that the underlying handles to objects are represented by the Resource<I>
type, very similarly to proxies in wayland-client.
These resources are used to send messages to the client (in the Wayland context,
these are called "events"). You usually don't use them directly, and instead call
methods on the Rust objects themselves, which invoke the appropriate Resource methods.
It is also possible to directly use the Resource::<I>::send(..) method.
There is not a 1 to 1 mapping between Rust object instances and protocol
objects. Rather, you can think of the Rust objects as Rc-like handles to a
Wayland object. Multiple instances of a Rust object can exist referring to the same
protocol object.
Similarly, the lifetimes of the protocol objects and the Rust objects are
not tightly tied. As protocol objects are created and destroyed by protocol
messages, it can happen that an object gets destroyed while one or more
Rust objects still refer to it. In such case, these Rust objects will be disabled
and the alive() method on the underlying Resource<I> will start to return false.
Events that are subsequently sent to them are ignored.
Implementations
To receive and process messages from the clients to you (in Wayland context they are
called "requests"), you need to provide an Implementation for each Wayland object
created in the protocol session. Whenever a new protocol object is created, you will
receive a NewResource<I> object. Providing an implementation via its implement() method
will turn it into a regular Rust object.
All objects must be implemented, even if it is an implementation doing nothing.
Failure to do so (by dropping the NewResource<I> for example) can cause future fatal
protocol errors if the client tries to send a request to this object.
An implementation is a struct implementing the RequestHandler trait for the interface
of the considered object. Alternatively, an FnMut(I::Request, I) closure can be
used with the implement_closure() method, where I is the interface
of the considered object.
A Rust object passed to your implementation is guaranteed to be alive (as it just received a request), unless the exact message received is a destructor (which is indicated in the API documentations).
Event loops and general structure
The core of your server is the Display object. It represent the ability of your program to
process Wayland messages. Once this object is created, you can configure it to listen on one
or more sockets for incoming client connections (see the Display docs for details).
To properly function, this Wayland implementation also needs an event loop structure,
which is here provided by the calloop crate. It is a public dependency and is reexported
as wayland_server::calloop.