Re: libseed-list Fwd: Seed Interest

[Robert Carr <carrr rpi edu>]

Tim already replied to this very well, but some of these questions
come up a lot, so I have a few other points.
> Hi,
> I'm a web dev by trade and I have been looking for a way to bring my
> JavaScript skills to the Linux desktop for a while. This seems to be the
> solution I need. I am very excited, I have some questions: -
>
> Are there any JavaScript frameworks for seed in development?
>
> Of what sort? Most of the web JavaScript frameworks help with DOM
> manipulation and the like, which something you simply don't have to do with
> Seed. There are people using Seed with small parts of Django's JavaScript
> *language* extensions (however this required the careful stripping of
> anything that attempted to manipulate the DOM), and we've copied some of
> these into Seed to be used (Array.filter/forEach/every/map/..., etc.).
>

In a sense, Seed is very much a JavaScript framework, and the
"imports.gi" object (and associated classes it can construct), is just
a part of it that adds support for interacting with the outside world
via GObject introspection. In the GI will probably just be a module,
in the same way that "ffi" or readline is, on top or the core of Seed.

The core both provides things like the imports object, or the builtins
(print, etc...), and C JS classes (a concept internal to the JSC C
API, much more like traditional OO than JavaScript OO), which enable
modules to be able to coexist peacefully (for example an object that
you get from one module, which is a pointer to a C structure, can be
used as a pointer to a C structure in another module also, which has
no knowledge of the previous module).

So, in a sense Seed is both a JS framework, and a C framework for
creating new modules/extensions.

> Is it likely to be ported to KDE/XFCE, OSX & Windows?
>
> Seed will never support introspection of KDE/XFCE/OSX/Windows libraries, so
> without manually binding these, you will never get a native UI on them nor
> be able to use their libraries. Seed is a JavaScript<->GObject bridge,
> nothing more. However, it does run on OS X (using X11 + Gtk to display the
> UI), and will work fine in a KDE/XFCE environment, just, again, depending on
> GLib and using Gtk for UIs). Nobody's put in the effort to get it working on
> Windows, but it could be done (again, though, depending on Gtk).
>

It is entirely possible that someone could write a Seed module (using
C), that could be used to do manipulations of things on KDE/XFCE, or
OSX, or Windows, however, I imagine this would only be useful for
integration at a detail level, and can't imagine it working well
enough to use Qt from Seed without a lot of effort. In addition the
core of Seed will always depend on GLib/GObject (though I guess not GI
at one point, but it will all still be part of the same module unless
there is a compelling reason to change that).

The FFI module is sort of a first step in this direction, once it
becomes more useful, I imagine that you could write small JS modules
which use FFI to provide friendly wrappers of platform specific
libraries. It's very easy to come up with simple formats for
describing bindings in JSON and whip up some sort of code generator,
I've found, and this is relevant also.

> Would you like screen-dumps/code for things I use seed for?
> We'd love to see what you're doing with it!

Definitely, also any feedback you have on things that are
counterintuitive, or ways to make things more approachable.
>
> Nicholas
>
> Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
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>
> --
> Peace. Love. Linux.
>
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