GNOME Javascript questions and a bit of presentation

[Eduardo Lima Mitev <elima igalia com>]

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Hi,

Although I have been a G-I/Gjs user for a long time due to my work in
an introspected library, this is my first e-mail to this list so a bit
of presentation would be polite. My name is Eduardo Lima and I work
for Igalia. I'm a happy GNOME user since many years and have made a
few modest contributions to it. In the past I used to code for the Web
(and I still do sometimes), and I'm also a Javascript fan.

The purpose of this mail is basically to gather the opinion of the
GNOME javascript community regarding the developer story and the
relationship with other javascript communities/efforts. I will be
giving a talk titled "Javascript, the GNOME way" at JSConf.eu [1] next
weekend. My purpose is to communicate to the wider Javascript audience
about the technologies and innovation that GNOME is driving regarding
JS;  why automatic API reflexion using g-i and gjs/seed is a wonderful
developer experience and how can a regular JS developer start using
it. My ultimate goal is to raise interest on collaboration and
alignment where it fits, and hopefully attract new developers to
write/contribute-to GNOME applications.

I submitted this talk because back in 2009 while I was attending that
year's edition of JSConf I informally demoed the gnome-shell and it
raised huge interest when I explained that the UX was mostly written
in JS. Nobody there seemed to know about what GNOME was doing and I
felt there was a need for more communication. Last year I missed the
deadline for submitting a talk but this year I got it accepted.

I know that I'm not the best messenger from GNOME to give this talk as
I'm not a G-I nor gjs core developer, but I will try to do my best to
educate the audience about our technology from a developer point of view.

Now, I have specific questions that I would like the GNOME community
to answer in order to build the proper message:

1) Is there motivation/interest in the GNOME javascript community to
implement CommonJS [2] API specs? CommonJS intends to "standardize" a
set of common APIs to be implemented by the different JS
engines/platforms to improve code reuse and harmony among them. It has
gained in popularity and today almost every JS developer do try to use
CommonJS APIs as much as possible.

I would be specially interested in the reasons behind negative answers
to this question.

Just as an exercise/experiment, I recently started writing a wrapper
to gjs that would provide CommonJS support. Code is at [4] and only
'Modules' (require) is implemented at the moment. I know this is not
the way to go in the long term but it could perhaps persuade the right
people to push for this alignment if the experiment succeeds (meaning
people use the wrapper instead of plain gjs).

2) Do we have an agreement for the long term, about whether gjs or
seed will finally be "the" engine? (or none and instead we pick
python/pygobject?) I suppose we are not willing to maintain and push
for both. My guess is that seed would eventually be the chosen one as
it has to be already there anyway for WebkitGTK+. I did read Colin
Waters' thread [3] "gjs/seed" but I would like to get an explicit
confirmation (if there is one).

3) What is the current state and the plan/roadmap to provide binding
documentation of GNOME libraries? I know this was the focus of last
G-I hackfest in Berlin and maybe there is already a "favorite"
solution to the problem.

4) Do we have any clue about the right developer tools we need for
writing GNOME apps in binding languages? Can we talk about a future
GNOME SDK or something of the like?

5) Is there other specific message our community would like to state
to that audience, or specific feedback to obtain from them? I would be
happy to proxy these messages too :).

I do thank you all for taking a few minutes and help me communicate
GNOME in this other forum.

cheers,

Eduardo

[1] http://jsconf.eu
[2] http://www.commonjs.org/
[3]
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-April/msg00147.html
[4] https://gitorious.org/gjs-commonjs/gjs-commonjs
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