Server API
==========

Server Introduction
-------------------

The open-source reference implementation of Wayland protocol is split in
two C libraries, :ref:`Client API` and
libwayland-server. Their main responsibility is to handle the Inter-process
communication (*IPC*) with each other, therefore
guaranteeing the protocol objects marshaling and messages synchronization.

The server library is designed to work much like libwayland-client, although it
is considerably complicated due to the server needing to support multiple
versions of the protocol. It is best to learn libwayland-client first.

Each open socket to a client is represented by a :type:`wl_client`.  The
equvalent of the :type:`wl_proxy` that libwayland-client uses to represent an
object is :type:`wl_resource` for client-created objects, and :type:`wl_global`
for objects created by the server.

Often a server is also a client for another Wayland server, and thus must link
with both libwayland-client and libwayland-server.  This produces some type
name conflicts (such as the :type:`client_wl_display` and
:type:`server_wl_display`, but the duplicate-but-not-the-same types are
opaque, and accessed only inside the correct library where it came from).
Naturally that means that the program writer needs to always know if a pointer
to a wl_display is for the server or client side and use the corresponding
functions.


.. c:autodoc:: src/wayland-server.h src/wayland-server-core.h src/wayland-server.c
   :compat: javadoc-liberal