RE: GNOME support in RH8

[Biswapesh Chattopadhyay <biswapesh_chatterjee tcscal co in>]

I'd like to add my 2c here as the maintainer of 1.x version of Anjuta.

Anjuta2 is shaping up nicely and already has more powerful project
manager features as compared to Anjuta1. It also has a much better
framework and is fully GNOME2 app. I feel it is more-or-less ready for a
pre-alpha release.

Moreover, Anjuta 1.x HEAD has now been ported fully to GNOME2 and has
many more features as compared to Anjuta2. We expect to release both the
GNOME 1.x and GNOME 2.x versions of Anjuta1 by the end of this month or
in early March.

Hopefully, we can start working on porting Anjuta1 stuff to Anjuta2 once
a reasonable IDE (Anjuta1 HEAD) is made available to develop GNOME2
apps.

However, while IDEs are useful, the need of the hour IMHO is more
documentation of GNOME APIs with examples, templates, samples, pointers
to real-life code usage, etc. We are way behind QT, MFC, Java and most
other GUI frameworks in this respect. Even the GTK+ documentation is
very sketchy, and the tutorial is very incomplete.
http://developer.gnome.org/ contains very few tutorials and manuals for
other GNOME technologies such as bonobo(ui), etc. When asked, people on
MLs point out that the documentation that exist, but it is easy to see
that they are totally insufficient quality and quantity wise.

Also, the APIs are in a flux and there are two many ways to do the same
thing. Take the menu/toolbar situation, or the glade/libglade/bonoboui
one. There needs to be more standardization, consolidation and
documentation before these technologies can be useful.

Thirdly, though lots of cool technology is available, they are not very
well integrated. For example, gal has some really cool widgets but it's
practically impossible to use since there are no samples, no docs and no
tutorial available. There is no tutorial on how to develop simple
database apps quickly using glade + libglade + gnome-db. There is no
proper documentation on the bonoboui (esp. the ui file format), which is
really sad since it is pretty powerful stuff.

Currently, the best (only ?) way to develop GNOME apps is to go through
the code of other GNOME apps and copy the relevant bits. But this
practice is simply not practical for RAD and newbies. IDEs can provide
wizards, templates, etc. but they only go a small way without proper
code guidance, docs, et al.

So, to conclude, IMO, docs / examples / turorials / standardization /
consolidation is the need of the hour, not IDEs.

Rgds,
Biswa.

> 
> On Sun, 2003-02-16 at 23:12, Franck Martin wrote:
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Havoc Pennington [mailto:hp redhat com]
> > > Sent: Monday, 17 February 2003 11:07
> > > To: John Palmieri
> > > Cc: Robert Parkhurst; gnome-devel-list gnome org
> > > Subject: Re: GNOME support in RH8
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Sun, Feb 16, 2003 at 06:05:35PM -0500, John Palmieri wrote:
> > > >
> > > > I belive you need gnome-common from the gnome CVS.
> > > >
> > >
> > > Which is a bug fixed in newer versions of glade.
> > >
> > > But, the important thing is: do not use glade to generate your build
> > > system and code. Only use it to create .glade files, then load those
> > > with libglade... anything else is going to hose you in the end.
> > >
> > That's an interesting new concept...I think glade for gnome2.0 is not
> ready
> > and this is a huge problem, as there is no cool development platform for
> > Gnome2.0.
> 
> Glade works great if you use it to generate .glade files like Havoc
> said.  Yes it would be nicer if it was integrated into an IDE but
> creating GNOME 2 apps with Glade and libglade is fairly easy as it is.
> 
> > How does it integrates with anjuta?
> Depends what you mean by Anjuta.  There are two versions 1.0 and 2.  1.0
> is the stable GTK+/Gnome 1 version of Anjuta.  Anjuta 2 is a CVS only
> work in progress and the IDE I use.  Anjuta 2 does noty yet integrate
> with Glade though the framework is available to do so in the future.
> Basicly the Anjuta developers wanted to complete Anjuta 1 before they
> committed to Anjuta 2 instead of just leaving the project incomplete.  I
> feel this was a noble choice even if it did set back a Gnome 2 IDE for a
> bit.
> 
> > I think the new versions of Gnome should not be released until glade and
> > anjuta are able to develop applications with the latest Gnome libraries.
> > That would avoid developers to go in the racing game to catch up with
> gnome
> > development.
> Developers are always racing ;-) Anjuta 2 and Glade 2 can target the
> latest libraries though they may not automate everything just yet.
> Stopping Gnome releases just to get the IDE's in sync is like stopping
> work on the Linux Kernel just so X can catch up or for that matter
> stopping features in X so Gnome can catch up.  They are all layers and
> besides not all developers use IDE's.
> 
> >
> > I think gnome2.2.0 has been released and nor anjuta nor glade is gnome
> 2.0
> > complaint yet...
> >
> Anjuta 2 has a nice project druid that will generate simple Gnome 2
> application template.  As a developer you still need to know the details
> of the Gnome 2 API's in order to create anything useful.  I think this
> is a good thing becaused I would have never learned as much as I have if
> all I did was trust an IDE to generate code for me.  That being said I
> understand there is a group of programmers who just want to get up and
> running as fast as possible.  The current batch of developers tools
> looks to be shaping up very nicely and will most likely become easier to
> use as time goes on.  But there lies the problem.  These things take
> time, and other projects can not simply sit idle.  It is kind of funny
> because Anjuta 2 as an application already has features, such as
> tear-off/dockable windows, not currently present in the stable Gnome/Gtk
> 2.x releases.  So they both are ahead of each other in some respects.
> 
> --
> J5
> 
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