Re: Mummy, I made a platform in my pants! [Was: focus!]

[Alex Graveley <alex beatniksoftware com>]

Respectfully, I don't agree.  There is a big set of missing frameworks 
that stops rich interop in Gnome applications, and generally make 
applications much harder to write well.  All other desktop platforms 
include at least a subset of these...

* Document framework
Provides document loading/saving/printing/etc abstractions, window/tab 
management, automatic recently used, scripting hooks, etc.

* Scripting framework
Allows apps to easily expose external scripting and event notification. 
 D-BUS was the big missing piece here.  Can specify sets of interfaces 
for common tasks that apps can implement, and building up the frameworks 
to provide useful default implementations.

* Rich Extension/Plugin framework
Common UI for installing/removing plugins and checking for updates and 
downloading, common hooks for menu/toolbar integration and UI event 
integration.

* Undo framework
Almost no applications in Gnome support good Undo.  Should provide both 
 reliable desktop-wide interaction for text widgets as well as at an 
abstract object level.

* Rich DND/CopyPaste framework
Undocumented DND targets, poor support, and manual data parsing abound 
in our applications.  Could provide structured data interop to make 
doing this loads easier.

* Persistence framework
Saving and indexing application-internal data, optionally exposing to 
search engines like beagle.

Each one of these is a really large amount of work that doesn't exist at 
all today, with various bits being implemented from scratch in every 
application.

-Alex

Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> The GNOME platform is pretty much *done* at this point from the
> viewpoint of "what more code do we need?".