Re: mutter tiling

[Oliver Mangold <o mangold googlemail com>]

On 17.03.2011 14:52, Jesse Hutton wrote:
> I've been wondering about the possibility of the leveraging the GWT 
> compiler to write gnome-shell extensions (any js code, really) in Java.
I'm not familiar with GWT but it seems to be a funny trick. Though I 
think the more traditional solution would be to create bindings for 
other languages to the gnome-shell-extension API and allow extensions to 
be written directly in these languages.

Or another workaround could be to write a small wrapper file in 
javascript which just contains a main() that executes the real thing in 
your language of choice and forwards the references to the gnome-shell 
objects you need. Didn't check, though, how easily this can be done.
> I haven't really looked into it yet (and I don't know much about 
> gnome-shell's APIs), but I think it would be a great way to write code 
> for the desktop. The Java interfaces to mutter could be generated 
> automatically, giving you type safety against the mutter API, and 
> you'd have a nice, strongly typed development language for extensions :).
Yes, I also think along these lines. I just mentioned Vala because it is 
basically the same as Java and already can pull in the typesafe 
Gobject-introspection bindings (which gnome-shell and mutter use) 
automatically. But aside from this Java would be fine with me as well.