Re: Developing and Testing panel applets

[John Palmieri <johnp martianrock com>]

On Thu, 2002-12-19 at 12:19, Sergey V. Oudaltsov wrote:
> Hi
> 
> > 	Unless they are acutely clueful they will kill the panel when they go
> > deferencing invalid pointers / corrupting memory etc. and it makes it
> > very hard to sift genuine panel bug reports from random side-effects of
> > other people's broken code.
> I 100% agree. But you don't want to save some user RAM, do you? And do
> not want people to be accurate writing applets, do you?
Just to inject another point of view.  The panel-notification-area
applet in 2.1 and RedHat 2.0 builds provides yet another way of creating
panel interactivity.  This is of course only used if your application
needs some visibility on the panel and is not a good option for
applications that run only in the panel.  

Gaim transitioned from using applets to using the notification area
which allowed for a lot of improvments.  First gaim used to have to be
compiled for both GNOME and non-GNOME users now all the #ifdef GNOME
stuff was stripped out.  All notification code was then moved to a shlib
plugin that a user can load during runtime to get an icon on the panel
that works just like the old applet except it show up in the
notification area.  If Gaim crashes the icon simply goes away.  Using
the notification area also has the added benefit  of working in KDE's
panel (or so I am told though I have never seen it in action).  Here are
the mem statistics with and without the plugin loaded:

Gaim without notification plugin:
Total: 10.5
RSS: 10.5
Shared: 5.4

Gaim with notification plugin:
Total: 10.6
RSS: 10.6
Shared: 5.4

I don't know if this tells the whole story as the memory might just be
increasing in another area but if the number are accurate that is a .1Mb
increase which is nothing. 

Just a thought

--
J5