Re: Separate UI and core processes

[David Bolter <david bolter utoronto ca>]

Hi Tristan,

The MVC pattern has been around a long time but your suggestion of
moving UI into its own process is quite intriguing. The marshalling of
data, and the need for a really tight response to user actions, are
going to be pain points I think. Still worth some real investigation.
Are you looking into this further?

cheers,
David

Tristan Buckmaster wrote:
> 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 monolithic applications that only run properly on outdated platforms.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
>
>   
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