[gnome-love] A tale of shells and bonobo

[Caleb Land <bokonon rochester rr com>]

Hello,
I am looking to re-write an old GTK+ application with the new
technologies in GNOME, and was looking at Bonobo.

What I would like is a system similar to evolution (with merging menus
and interfaces), so I was looking at the code for evolution and gIDE.  I
keep seeing references to a "shell" abstraction and I can't quite grasp
what they do (in a general sense).

If somebody could explain the general concept behind a "shell" in these
applications I would appreciate it.  Also, I would like to know if there
are any other good sources for examples of Bonobo and UI merging.  I'm
not affraid to read code, but this stuff seems hard, though I used this
opportunity to learn basic CORBA, so I'm one step closer :)

See, my application has distinct parts (similar to that of evolution), I
have an auction manager, an auction theme manager, etc. and I would like
to keep it open for "plug-ins" later on (I *think* like gIDE).

Thank you!

-- 
An aspiring gnome developer,
Caleb Land

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