Re: What to do in order to make the gnome development platform rock.

[Christian Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>]

Hi Kenneth,
Well as someone just begining to meddle in Java I like your ideas, I am
CC'ing it to the java-gnome list also. 

I think giving official status of a set of bindings would probably also
be an idea, for instance there are 3 different Java bindings for GTK+
and GNOME underway AFAIK and maybe if one of them got recognised as the
official GNOME bindings the duplication of effort could be minimized.

One thing I do think however is that we should demand that any language
bindings that are to become/get approved as the official GNOME and GTK+
language bindings are that they move into GNOME CVS.

Christian

On Sat, 2001-09-15 at 19:17, Kenneth Rohde Christiansen wrote:
> Some thoughs of mine, please read:
> 
> By attending the university you often hear non-gnome and non-kde
> developers discuss different platforms, technologies, kde and gnome.   
> While listening to this I have a bigger understanding why these people  
> don't join our project.
> 
> One of the reasons is that many people actually don't like C very much,
> and when these people want to code Gnome they go look for bindings.   
> Many Gnome developers think that Gnome is very cool with all it's
> binding,
> but this thought is not shared with the whole world outside out
> community.
> 
> Many people think that the Gnome development platform is difficult to
> understand. There are lots of libraries, and they are not organized in a
> nice class library. This is possible to do with bindings to OO
> languages, but is as far as I know, not done.
> 
> For instance, Java-GNOME has the following "namespaces"/"packages":
> 
> gnu.gdk, gnu.gtk, gnu.glade, gnu.gnome
> 
> This is very close to the C libs, so it would be easy to switch to Java
> from programming Gnome in C. But almost noone does this. People who want
> to use the Java bindings is often people who don't like C.
> 
> Now the naming is also very unlucky for Java-GNOME as gnu.gnome is
> actually gnome-libs, but for people from the outside Gnome consists of
> gtk, gdk, glade, gnome-libs, etc, so the class library seems weird to
> these people. Also the class library for a binding doesn't have to
> reflect that it is made by using gdk, gtk or whatever.
> 
> If we want people to use these bindings we have to make them easy and
> hide implimentation/bindings details.
> 
> An idea for Java-GNOME could be like this:
> 
> org.gnome.drawing                       - gdk
> org.gnome.ui                            - gtk
> org.gnome.ui.extra                      - libgnomeui + bonoboui
> org.gnome.ui.glade                      - glade
> org.gnome.accessibility                 - atk
> org.gnome.containers (or .utils)        - glib containers wrappers    
> org.gnome.canvas                        - libgnomecanvas
> org.gnome.vfs                           - gnome-vfs
> org.gnome.config                        - gconf or bonobo-conf
> org.gnome.bonobo                        - bonobo
> org.gnome.bonobo.activation             - bonobo-activation
> org.gnome.xml                           - libxml (if it makes sence to
> bind)
> org.gnome.print                         - libgnomeprint
> --
> org.gnome.misc.eel                      - eel
> org.gnome.misc.gal                      - gal
> org.gnome.misc.panel                    - panel applets
> ...etc.
> 
> 
> This doesn't confuse people with the difference with gtk, gdk and gnome,
> and it integrates well with the Java language. All not well integrated
> things have been put in org.gnome.misc and might be moved elsewhere
> later.
> 
> A similar hierachy can be used for C++ bindings.
> 
> Also, something people don't like about the Gnome bindings is that none
> are OFFICIAL. For people outside our community it seems that the
> bindings 
> are made by people with no connection to the Gnome Community, and they
> then fear the quality of the bindings, and goes elsewhere.
> 
> What can we do to make this better? Should we decide on a class library
> that should be followed by binders if they want their bindings to be
> official. Do we need some kind of quality control?
> 
> I really think that we should get some good Java bindings. Both Sun and
> IBM said that they support Gnome, and they both have a strong Java    
> commitment. Cooperation with Sun and IBM about this would really rock.
> Maybe something for the Gnome Foundation?.
> 
> Also the development pages really scare people away.
> 
> Take a look at these two pages:
> 
> http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Cocoa/CocoaTopics.html
> http://developer.apple.com/macosx/architecture/
> 
> We really need something like this. And we need to group our
> technologies,
> maybe something like this could be an idea?
> 
> GNOME System Architecture
> -------------------------
> 
> GNOME User Experience (libgnome, glade, gtk, gdk)
> --
> Bonobo Component System
> GNOME Language Framework (Java-GNOME, python, etc)
> GNOME Multimedia Framework (gstreamer)
> --
> Linux/UNIX Kernel
> UNIX into the future. GNOME expands on many open souce
> and industry standards towards providing UNIX users and
> developers with a userfriendly and powerful desktop and
> development platform.
> 
> Anyway, it's just some ideas. Please comment
> 
> Cheers, Kenneth
> 
> 
> 
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