Re: comment about gnome architecture

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp martianrock com>]

On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 15:15, Alan wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 01:11:38PM +0100, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
<snip>
> > Should the barrage of unfocused comments being thrown at us really turn
> > a blind eye to features users have a right to expect from us given our
> > long-term goals ?
> 
> I have to agree.  Just because someone's comments are long don't mean
> they don't have merit, or a good point.  Personally I have to agree with
> the comment.  Something like VB is indeed evil, but giving users a quick
> and easy way to write apps was a huge boost to the windows world.  99%
> of a simple app could be "written" by clicking and dragging and it gave
> users the power to create what was missing.  I remember writing a
> picture viewer in a couple of hours years and years ago.  
> 
> If the commenter was not "well informed" then why weren't they?
> Assuming it's not a troll (and I doubt it was), is the information out
> there about the interfaces or ease of gnome programming lacking, or just
> not available?  

The biggest thing I have heard on this subject from people who are
unfamiliar to the Gnome process is that documentation is hard to
find/not in one area.  When I point them to devhelp and gtk.org they
then get a bit more friendly.  I think they expect to go to gnome.org
and have a link right off the main page.  The web page is a known issue
that I hear is being worked on, but those not in the know just assume
there is nothing going on until they can see the results.  

As for a nice drag and drop programming interface there are a couple of
projects working to that goal, all be it slowly.  There is the project I
work on, Scaffold, which needs a lot of love before we even think about
DnD widgets though it is a stated goal; Anjuta, which is well
established but also needing love in the ease of use area; and Eclipse's
GUI project which just got started.  Right now I am working on parsing
the code structure to allow for easy construction of gobjects.  That
same code will be able to add signal handlers when a user creates one in
an embedded glade.  Glade needs to get to the point that it is
embeddable.  So there is a lot of intial things that need to happen
before we can have a truly RAD IDE.  That being said, once it does
happen, using languages like python and perl in conjunction with a RAD
IDE we can have an enviornment that is just as easy for newbies as VB.  

The infrastructure/architecture realy is there, we just need to pull the
pieces together.  As certaint pieces fall into place, devlopment of
these RAD IDE's (and other apps) will pick up steam.

--
J5