Cheese Architecture Redesign

[Hernan Gatta <gattahernan gmail com>]

Hello,

Cheese has been evolving quite some recently and I've been looking at 
the ideas that you would like to see implemented in the upcoming 
releases in order to make Cheese even better. However, I have indeed 
looked at the code and I am afraid to say that as with almost any 
program coded in C, Cheese will exponentially grow in complexity as 
features are added. I've tried to add some of the features and the 
code-base is pretty complex to work with in terms of dynamically 
managing the Gstreamer pipeline, for instance. I would like to propose a 
new design based on Mono (.NET) that would allow a very simplistic (and 
even cross-platform) core filled with easy-to-write extensions based on 
the Mono.Addins framework (look at 
http://www.mono-project.com/Mono.Addins). Applications like this one 
exist already and are seeing a growth in usage like Tomboy Notes and 
Banshee as well as the MonoDevelop IDE. I'd like to point out that the 
user interface need not change, just the underlying code; although I 
would like to see some sort of OpenGL-based GUI should the user's system 
support it in order to bring more "bling" to the program (using things 
like Clutter as a back-end - http://clutter-project.org/). I've started 
some work on this myself already and I will continue to work on it. I 
would like to hear your input on this idea and see what can be done 
about it.

Thanks,

Hernan.