Re: Online Desktop and GNOME 2.22

["John Stowers" <john stowers lists gmail com>]

On Nov 22, 2007 6:40 AM, Alp Toker <alp atoker com> wrote:

Colin Walters wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-11-20 at 15:23 -0200, Pedro de Medeiros wrote:
>
>> That's all very interesting, but what about a better integration
>> of on-line applications in the desktop environment like regular
>> applications? Have you seen, for instance, prism?
>>
>> http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/
>>
>> I think this is a very simple idea, and also a good match for a
>> on-line desktop project.
>
> I agree, and blogged about this last month:
>
> http://cgwalters.livejournal.com/9706.html
>

There's no need to look far and wide for this kind of functionality.

We've already got a sleek and powerful browser component built around
GLib and GTK+ whose sole purpose is integration with the desktop:

  http://live.gnome.org/WebKitGtk

Just to broaden this discussion a little....

I recently tried Pagico [1] (which is a cross platform personal organiser). AFAICT (its closed source) Their approach to cross platform development seemed to involve writing the application in PHP and then starting apache to serve it. The app is then a thin-ish wrapper around firefox/gtkmozembed widget that connected to http://localhost:port

My question is, do we want to encourage this sort of development in GNOME, and if so, how?.

For example, the new shiny HTML5 client db stuff in webkit [2] will go some way to allowing desktop apps to be written in HTML/JS and then run inside a light webkit shell, but can we do better. What about
* A simple way to start a webkit browser widget associated with a private, standalone httpserver? - might be necessary if someone wants to write apps in PHP/some other server side language
* Some way to communicate gtk-isms/function calls from the html/js app to the desktop. For example, I have previoulsy acomplished this (in pygtkmozembed) by
1) encoding  gtk function calls as _javascript_ status messages
2) catching on_status_changed and then reecreating the call
Can webkit facilitate some sort of Gtk/GNOME _javascript_ binding?

Anyway, somthing else to think about

John

[1] http://www.pagico.com/
[2] http://webkit.org/blog/126/webkit-does-html5-client-side-database-storage/

_______________________________________________
desktop-devel-list mailing list
desktop-devel-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list