A library API to Glade3 for other programs.

[Archit Baweja <bighead users sourceforge net>]

Hi

This topic has been a discussion for quite a while since glade1 and anjuta1
(and maybe gIDE too).
The other day I was talking to jeroen (one of the lead programmers of
the scaffold project) and we were discussing better embedding support of glade
from glade3 onwards. 

This might not be the right time to discuss such options one might say (from
the glade3 developer's POV), since
we're still getting glade3 to clone the glade1 (and 2.0) features properly. 
But it maybe better to concentrate on this now so we can build glade3
from the ground up for better support for embedding it into IDE's like
anjuta-2 (the gnome2 port) and scaffold.

I don't know, but it might be more work if we plan to go ahead to finish
glade3 first (finish as in make it do all that glade-2 can presently do), and
then decide to change it for embedding support.

There are 2 main ways of exposing the glade3's capabilities

1) Bonobo || IDL interfaces. Lots of Bonobo/CORBA overhead involved. Gives us
the glade3 develops more to do. But we have the advantage of starting "late"
on working this without changing much of the code. With the other option, we
might just have to start changing from the ground up.

2) A simple C library API interface. Not much overhead. And saves the glade3
developers lot of work. Projects wanting to embedd glade3 can encapsulate
it by wrapping glade3 API calls in their own plugin/dock system.

During our discussion on #devel-tools on irc.gnome.org, we had sort of went in
favour of option 2. But its the community's call.

These were just some of my views.
Suggestions, comments, criticisms....
Archit Baweja

P.S. I'm sending a copy of this to gnome-devtools, so we might have a problem
keeping this thread to one list.