Re: Understanding applets

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Kasper Peeters wrote:
>
> No, that's not what I'm suggesting. I would like to see 'being an applet'
> be an _extension_ of programs. In this view, applets are _more_, not
> less, than normal programs.
>

But then applets are harder to write, and have a larger executable (I know
with Mico this is a silly point to make, but that is being fixed).
 
> Why is eg. the cdplayer applet an applet and not a normal program. It
> makes perfect sense as something that runs without sitting in the panel.
> 

Because the applet is a small, easy to write program, and the standalone
app has a lot more complications if it really does everything it should. 

You could write a program that can be an applet and a regular program,
it's just that no one has, because a plain applet is easier to write, and 
presumably they didn't need it to run standalone. If you want that feature 
in any of the applets you could add it.

You could also write up a little library to make it easy for an app
to run either as an applet or standalone; it would just use the panel
facilities or its own routines as appropriate. Then it would be easy to 
write a program that was both standalone and an applet.

There's nothing about the current applet setup to keep you from doing
this. ;-)

Havoc Pennington ==== http://pobox.com/~hp