Re: developer friendlyness

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Wed, 17 Nov 1999, Ben FrantzDale wrote:
> I've seen KDE folks touting that "KDE is developer-friendly!" particularly
> an item from http://www.kdeforum.org/news. I also know some people who have
> begun programing in QT/KDE after exploring the options because they find it
> an easier programming envirnment. I am not much of a programmer and have yet
> to look into writing for GTK/GNOME or QT/KDE, but I'd just like to put the
> issue out. The more Gnome software the better, so having gtk/gnome as a
> first envirnment for more budding young programers should be a goal.
> 

There are some things we could do to make development easier, but in
general GTK/GNOME is a nice programming environment as well. And some
things are easier in GNOME than they are in KDE, just as some KDE things
are easier than GNOME. I think it would be useful to all involved to have
a fair, unbiased comparison on a feature-by-feature basis, but I'm sure
someone writing that would get lots of flames... ;-)

Hopefully no one will take this as a flame, but I don't think Navindra's
example is very meaningful in some sense; any pre-built component is easy
to use. For example, to create an About box in GNOME, I just say:

 about = gnome_about_new(author, copyright, blah blah);
 gtk_widget_show(about);

because the about box code has already been written. However this tells
you nothing about the ease-of-use of the programming environment in
general. So just as this about box example doesn't tell you that much
about GNOME, the KHTML example doesn't tell you that much about KDE.

The questions are:
 - how many pre-written components are there? are they the components 
   you're most likely to need?
 - how flexible are the pre-written components? i.e. how often 
   do you have to start from scratch because the prewritten stuff 
   won't work?
 - how hard is it to start from scratch, when that's needed? that is, 
   how easy/flexible is the low-level framework?

And FWIW, if all goes well you'll be able to use an HTML component easily
in GNOME 2.0, something like:

object = new_bonobo_component("HTML Component");
gtk_widget_show(object);

where the component returned is user-defined, GtkHTML, Mozilla, even
KHTML.

Havoc