Re: Having a hard time programming shell extensions

[Jay Strict <jay strict posteo de>]

On 13.08.2016 17:41, Mario Wenzel wrote:
> Hi Shell List,
>
> recently I find myself having a hard time programming extensions for the
> gnome-shell. Most of the things I want to do, I have no idea how to
> start (or if it is possible with a sensible amount of work).

Yes, I have had the same experience, programming extensions. The docs,
if existent, are hard to come by. Sometimes they are wrong.
Often, looking at other shell extensions gives you a clue how to do things.

> For the things I currently want to do with some extensions I would need
> to do OAuth2 and xml-Parsing. I have problems finding any documentation
> on how to do anything. We no longer even have an API-Browser. The linked
> browser on developer.gnome.org (http://docs.ptomato.name:9292/) no
> longer works.

Interersting! I've never heard of that API Browser. Very exactly is it
linked on developer.gnome.org?


Regarding XML parsing:

There is a "Simple XML Subset Parser" in GLib, but sadly it is not
available for the Javascript bindings [1].

For XML parsing, I use a third party javascript library in my shell
extension, namely sax-js [2].
If you want to see an example, for how to integrate this into your shell
extension, you can refer to my extension [3].

I cannot help with OAuth2.

> I think the shell and shell-extensions is one of the first contact
> points for users that want to add functionality to their gnome
> experience and the barriers for that are just too high.
> The lack of examples I can live with but the lack of API documentation
> for other languages than C makes it really hard for non-C-people like me
> to do anything.

You can generate HTML API docs yourself (e.g. for GLib) by running

# g-ir-doc-tool --language gjs -o ~/yelp-doc/
/usr/share/gir-1.0/GLib-2.0.gir
# mkdir ~/html-doc
# cd ~/html-doc
# yelp-build html ~/yelp-doc/


Furthermore, there is a collection of gjs binding docs [4], but it is
incomplete and it seems rather old. I don't know whether it is up to date.


Kind regards,

Jay




[1]
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2015-October/msg00008.html
[2] https://github.com/isaacs/sax-js
[3]
https://github.com/jaystrictor/gnome-shell-extension-syncthing/blob/master/filewatcher.js
[4] https://people.gnome.org/~gcampagna/docs/