Re: GNOME online desktop the great proxy

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Let's not call it GOD - people have been trying to de-acronym GNOME for 
years ;-) OD if you must acronym... but I think Online Desktop is better.

Brady Anderson wrote:
> Question for Havoc or Bryan.  How do you guys plan on supporting new Web 
> 2.0 services that become insanely popular, for ex. Twitter.?  I guess 
> I'm wondering if the service doesn't really fit into a first class 
> object how would you easily provide a nice desktop plugin leveraging GOD.

For me, an ideal way to program is to first do at least one, ideally 
several, specific hardcoded things that appear similar, and then if an 
abstraction presents itself introduce the abstraction.

Without a UI in mind and some implementation experience, one just has 
little chance of getting the abstraction right, in general. In some 
cases the abstraction may be trivial enough that it can be done up 
front, but often not.

Writing a library with no UI in mind is a good way to spend 75% of your 
time doing things that ultimately won't matter, and fail to do many 
things that ultimately will matter.

If there are no other things like Twitter, then you can't abstract 
Twitter meaningfully, though you might want to have a placeholder layer 
in case you abstract it in the future I would not ABI-freeze such a 
placeholder layer.

Havoc