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

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On 15 Sep 2001, 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.

Hi Kenneth,

If you are interested in making the language bindings for gnome better,
you might want to join the language-bindings gnome org list.  The authors
of a fair number of language bindings are on this list.

It has been fairly quiet for a while, but one of the things that has been
discussed there a fair bit is the new defs file format, which many
bindings use to generate the bindings.

At the moment, almost all bindings use a layout very similar to the C
APIs, and for good reason -- ease of learning and documentation.  The C
API for the gnome platform has the best documentation of all language
bindings, so by staying close to it, we can make use of the C
documentation as a starting point.  It also means people who already know
the C API can be get started with a language binding fairly quickly.

(In fact, I was able to write a little script that could extract the doc
strings from gtk+ and output some documentation using the defs file for
structure, giving some almost correct python documentation)

James.

-- 
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/