Re: Applets

[Grant McLean <grant mclean net nz>]

On Thu, 2007-02-01 at 14:39 +0100, Juan Josà 'Peco' San MartÃn wrote: 
> Hello all.
>
> I was looking for an easy way to deploy a Gnome applet and I find the
> project PerlPanel.org but it seems that the people behind haven't got
> enough time to work on it.
>
> Is PerlPanel currently the best approach to deploy Applets?. Do you have
> another solution?.

As I understand it, that project's aim is to provide an alternative
panel written in Perl.  Whereas what you probably want is a way to write
applets in Perl that can be used in the standard GNOME panel.

As Emmanuele said, the Gnome2::PanelApplet module is designed to support
that but unfortunately it doesn't work and that's unlikely to change
unless someone picks it up.

One workaround is to write your 'applet' as a standalone application and
then 'swallow' it into the GNOME panel with the GNOME Swallow Applet.
That's a bit clunky but it does work.

The approach I took is a little off-topic for this list - I switched to
Ruby :-)

I had a lot of fun learning Ruby and the Ruby Gtk bindings and the
result is at: http://www.mclean.net.nz/ruby/sshmenu/

The original Perl version (with much less functionality) is at:
http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=172532

Unfortunately, the Ruby Gtk bindings project has even less resources
than the Perl one and they're struggling to keep up.  One of the things
they've decided to do is deprecate and remove support for non-core
libraries including libpanelapplet.  So my applet won't work with the
next release of the Ruby bindings.  Maybe that's karma for me daring to
stray from Perl to Ruby :-)

Cheers
Grant