Separate UI and core processes

[Tristan Buckmaster <tristan buckmaster gmail com>]

hello everyone,

With the recent shakeup to the computing ecosystem with the addition of netbooks, ipods, android, gmail, facebook, etc.; I was wondering what place gnome will have in the future.  I was concerned with the platform inflexibility of programs such as Evolution, which is only really suitable to be run on a desktop or laptop; Gmail on the other hand works great on desktops, laptops, android phones, netbooks etc.  I can also run Gmail from pretty much any ones computer, whether it be Linux, Windows or Mac OS.

Now what I am advocating is not a complete rewrite of Gnome to run on the web; I believe that this is implausible for the moment.  What I would like to see is a concerted effort to provide greater separation between the UI and the core of Gnome programs, so the eventually there is a complete separation, ie. the UIs runs on a completely separate processes than the cores and so it would be possible to separate UIs and cores into completely separate development projects.  

Such separation would have a multitude of benefits.  Most programs already try to separate UI code, from core code, as this is simply a good programming practice, so this would just be taking that to the next step.  With the UI being a separate project, it would then be easy to fork this project and create a plethora of UIs, ones that work well on netbooks, ones for the web, even windows, mac osx and KDE ones (please don't shoot me, or start some flame war about using qt).  Such a development effort I think will help future proof Gnome and prevent Gnome become a collection of monolithic applications that only run properly on outdated platforms.  In the future I don't want to worry about what computer I am using, I just want to access my mail, music, documents, ect. in a consistent way no matter where the files are actually stored or where the core computations are actually done.  The cloud computing dream could become within reach.   It would also open Gnome up to a whole new set of potential open source developers; no longer will a developer have to understand the underlying architecture of an application to contribute to it.  Programmers would be free to experiment will all sorts of new UIs, taking advantage of new technologies such as 'multi-touch', accelerometers, eye-tracking, speech-recognition, etc.  New opportunities would exist for writing programs accessible for the deaf, or blind.  Also, I am sure Intel and AMD won't mind a few more processes for there future zillion core CPUs to play with.

Anyway that is just my armchair observer 2-cents, feel free to ignore me :-)

Tristan