Re: Gnome-Kde libraries

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Martin Michael <Michael.Martin@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk> writes:
> A while ago I remember seeing a thread on slashdot with Havoc talking about
> ideas for applications to use both gtk(gnome) and qt(kde) whether through an
> abstraction layer or directly
> 

I was probably saying that the abstraction layer is really hard to
write.:-) Certainly I don't know of anyone working on it.

IMO the best way to have a cross-GUI application that only has two GUI
targets is to put your real functionality in a library and write two
GUIs. An abstraction framework only starts to be useful if you are
writing multiple apps or targetting > 2 GUIs.

For 2 GUIs the abstraction framework takes far more effort than just
writing the two frontends separately. (See AbiWord and Mozilla for
good examples; they are going _much_ slower than a single-GUI app
would go, Mozilla less so now that their abstraction framework is
close to finished.)

If we were doing an abstract GUI framework for GNOME/KDE though it
would be silly to do our own, wxWindows, AWT, and Tk are all already
toolkits like this that could simply be ported to GTK/Qt. (wxWindows
already has been IIRC.)

Havoc