API was: Re: FAQ

[Marcus Denker <marcus ira uka de>]

On  6 Feb, Cheng-Chang Wu wrote:
> 
> It should emphasize the multilingual nature of GNOME. A GNOME
> application can be written in any language including C, C++, objective
> C, perl, guile, ... Sometimes I got the feeling that GNOME, or some of
> GNOME people hate C++, It should be clarified.  It seems to me that many
> C++ programmer prefer writing for KDE to GNOME because they have not got
> the idea that GNOME is C++ friendly too. Think of many newcomer of our
> software industry, who learn C++ instead C in the university and school.
> 
GNOME is: --> multilingual
          --> Windowmanager independent
          --> has a pluggable look-and-feel
          
I think we should add one thing to this list of "political statements".
GNOME should even be advertised as:
         ---> API-Independent.

Why this? Today all GNOME-apps are written directly with GTK or with
direct GTK-bindings. But there are Programms written in other APIs, and
the KDE-Idea ("we rewrite everything") is (IMHO) not very good.
The Idea of "One True API" is as false as the Idea of "One True
Language". 

Every app should use GTK (needed for a consistent look-and-feel),
but using it directly is not needed (but will be the "default"). 

wxWindows has been ported to GTK and provides a alternativ API for
C++ Programmers.   

APIs GNOME should support:

1) a GTK-Version of Lesstiff and Athena (no new apps will be
   written for this, but there are many motif apps, especially
   in the commercial world) 
   
2) TCL/TK should be ported to GTK.    

3) Wine (Win32 Emulator/ Library) ;-) 

3) GNUstep. This whould be really a great thing... 

GNUstep is very modular, there are plans/alpha code for backends
to WIN32, Xlib (both without DPS) and X/DPS. It should be
possible to write a Backend that uses GTK and gtkdps. Together with
CORBA-Bindigs to Openstep and CORBA-enabled Objective-C GNUstep/GNOME
whould be the "GNU-Desktop" of the future...   


-- 
Marcus Denker                 marcus@ira.uka.de