Re: Porting apps.

[Peter Korn <korn sun com>]

Hi Thomas,

> I've got some inhouse apps I had originally wrote for MS Windows, but 
> want to rewrite for the Gnome 2 desktop. What libs, sdk's, etc do I need 
> to insure that my finish product will be accessible with Gnompernicus?

I'm delighted to hear that you are looking to port apps from Windows to the
GNOME desktop.  The move to GNOME 2 is a big one, and the richer tools that
you've been used to in the Windows environment are still in the process of
moving to GNOME 2.  That means that if you are looking to port to GTK+
etc., for GNOME 2 immediately, you'll need to live with command line tools,
or do things like use Glade for 1.4 and then do a manual pass on the XML
output to make it compatible with libglade 2.

> Second question is it going to matter which language I use. I've thought
> about Java or C++, but am deciding which will be the better language. I 
> know under MS Windows in the past Java apps were vary hard to use until 
> the access bridge came out.
> 
> Now that Java has the speech sdk I'm wondering if that might be the 
> better choice. Any suggestions here?

Whether you should develop in C/C++ against GTK+ and the other GNOME
libraries, or using the Java platform, depends largely on where you want
your applications to run.  One of the GNOME 2 goals is to run in small
environments without requiring X.  If you want your applications to run in
that environment, then the Java 2 platform isn't a good choice today.  On
the other hands, if you are focused on desktop environments, and
additionally are interested in preserving your coding investment and
re-using it in non-GNOME environments (e.g. Windows, Macintosh, etc.), then
using the Java platform is the better choice.  Also, the state of Java
development tools presently is more rich and mature than for GNOME 2.  

Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team