Re: New Module Proposal: libseed

[Robert Carr <carrr rpi edu>]

A quick addendum, I was incorrect about external dependencies as
gobject-introspection does not seem to be listed as a GNOME external
dependency or module yet, however it seems to be very well received, and
is already receiving broad use (Vala, gnome-shell, several other language 
bindings...). So, Seed will in fact bring in a new external dependency on 
gobject-introspection.

==============Original message text===============
On Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:12:04 EST Robert Carr wrote:

I was not planning to do this until .28, however a nice Clutter game
written in Seed was merged in to gnome-games today, and there is some
interest in being able to include this in .26.

I would like to propose Seed (http://live.gnome.org/Seed) as a beta -bindings module for .26 For those not following, Seed is a set of bindings between WebKit's
JavaScriptCore interpreter, and GObject (through GObject introspection).
Seed provides a standalone interpreter, and a library with a clean API
for embedding Seed as a scripting language. Through GOBject-introspection 
Seed automatically provides bindings to dozens of libraries, in a
convenient fashion where individual bindings do not have to be maintained 
(but just the core library). Seed provides no "platform" of it's own
(unlike say Python) and builds instead on the large GNOME platform, in a
similar fashion to Vala. In short, Seed provides a way to write GNOME
applications in JavaScript, and to easily embed JavaScript as an
extension language in your application (similar to Guile, but perhaps
more accessible, as JavaScript is often cited as the language with the
most programmers).

Seed does not bring in any new external dependencies (if I am correct in
thinking that WebKit/GTK+ has been approved as an external dependency).

Seed uses GNOME SVN and FTP, I will file a ticket later today to set up a 
bugzilla.

Adoption so far is light. Today a Clutter game written in Seed (lightsoff, see: http://vimeo.com/2318879?pg=embed&sec=2318879) was merged in to gnome-games, and this is the primary motivation for proposal as a 2.6.26 module (so that this game could be released in gnome-games .26). In addition, I am currently working on some Vala integration to provide transparent embedding and conversion between Vala/Seed types, which will likely live upstream as a compiler plugin. There was some recent expression of interest from a member of the epiphany community. Seed is very easy to add as an extension language (at least to a GObject based application), and I think approval as a module could lead to much more rapid adoption over the next cycle.libseed and the interpreter are licensed under the LGPL, with a large set 
of examples and tests available under the X11 license.

The next release of Seed (on the 19th, with the rest of the GNOME devel
releases), will provide API stability (both C API, and JavaScript API),
for the foreseeable future. 

If anyone has any questions, related to Seed as a GNOME module, or just
in general, feel free to contact me on the list, or personally. I think
it would be a very good thing for Seed to be a module which applications
could depend on, and as a result am able to put in any (reasonable)
amount of work required to address concerns.

Thanks,
Robert



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