Re: [gDesklets] New features...?

["natan yellin" <aantny gmail com>]

Hello,
I thought I'd chime in about the Universal Applets part.
On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 9:12 AM, Lauri Kainulainen <
lauri kainulainen gmail com> wrote:

> Hi Mario and others,
>
> Mario González wrote:
>
>> Bjoern Koch wrote:
>>
>>> Well, I'd say as we are only a handfull of developers anyway it would be
>>>
>>
>>  We are not so many but that's ok. One issue I've been thinking a lot is
>> the  "problem" with gDesklets0.4; because development is (AFAIK) slow.
>> And perhaps we can release a 0.37 with new features ported from 0.4 and
>> others features added also.
>>
>
> Yes, I agree with the problem with 0.4. Personally I'm relatively excited
> about the Universal Applets approach of using XEmbed to allow intermixing of
> different app engines. There are some difficulties with it, but lot's of
> nice stuff also.
>
Yes, there are some disadvantages. Event handling is a bit difficult, but
it's something that can be (and is) worked around when necessary. The key
benefits of an xembed based architecture are the stability and the freedom
to write applets in any language using any toolkit.

It's not specific to the xembed architecture, but I suspect that the gtk+
offscreen rendering patch will let us achieve some nifty effects with
servers that display more than one applet. It's a bit hard to do that
without the server-applet approach.

I've been following the branch on LP and planning on trying to quickly hack
> the current 0.3x branch to support UA. Hopefully I get time to do that in
> the near future.
>
I'm going to be away for most of the summer, but I can help you out during
the next week or so. I'm planning on rewriting the Sidebar screenlet before
I leave, so you can look at that for an example server. (Yes, applets can
function as servers themselves, although I wouldn't take that approach with
the GDesklets integration.)

>
> What UA lacks is a better name and a strong web-presence, but those are
> fixable issues :)
>
We're working on that. Up until now, development was done in a hidden corner
of the Screenlets community, but the fork has allowed us to move beyond
that. A preliminary vote for a project name is currently
underway,<http://polls.zoho.com/aantn/vote-for-universal-applet-s-new-name>and
I'd love to see input from the GDesklets community as well.

>
>
>
>   I am going to Guadec this year and I've got 5 minutes to talk about
>> gDesklets. I'll show or I would like to show what can a developer do
>> with, what are we doing (as developers) and how can new hackers help to
>> the project.
>>
>
> That's great! Good luck! I'm sure new hackers will be very welcome! The
> docs suck, but at least people follow this mailing list.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Lauri
>
Natan