Re: A New GNOME Order

[Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>]

On Tue, 2008-12-09 at 20:05 +0100, Esben Stien wrote:

> I fear we are not setting correct guidelines for GNOME applications
> and now with GNOME mobile, there are just numerous weaknesses in GNOME
> that needs to be addressed at the highest level; a set of policies. 
> 
> It would be very nice with a policy of separating the core and UI
> throughout GNOME. This does not only mean applications using
> libraries; this means using daemons as the core of every application.

This is already happening for various components.

For example Tracker is becoming a RDF triple store. Although these
developments are not for tomorrow (rather for in a few months) a few
good GNOME developers are working on this as we speak.

This however will mean that you can ask Tracker quite a lot of things.

I also know multiple teams are considering to implement "E-mail as a
desktop service". For example the Evolution team has been discussing
this. This wont be easy, though (cursor based data models for the
summary and sorting at the service, and next to that streaming the
contents of MIME parts over the IPC to the UI are quite complex things
to perform over IPC).

IMHO should these team focus on the MIME part handling. As RDF triple
stores will eventually solve their "cursor based data models that are
sorted at the service"-problem.

Just doing camel_folder_get_summary() over IPC is of course not a very
good idea (Evolution's UI wouldn't be as snappy-fast as it is now, it
would instead take ~ 10 seconds to open a normal sized folder). That's
why you want sorting-at-the-service and page-based fetches and/or a
cursor based remote API (like database cursors, remote enumerators or
iterators - or whatever name you fancy for this -).

A recent example of developers moving functionality into services is
Thumbnailing:

http://live.gnome.org/ThumbnailerSpec

We are planning to spec the same thing for media cover and album art
downloading. On the Maemo devices you will have a D-Bus API for this
already. Just checkout the .xml files in this project if you want to
have a sneak preview: 

https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/haf/trunk/hildon-thumbnail/

That project also implements the ThumbnailerSpec, by the way.

Today I also started this proposal to allow E-mail clients to spew out
their metadata:

http://live.gnome.org/Evolution/Metadata

This is being proposed on Evolution's Hackers mailing list. You can
certainly join the fun of implementing it, just ping me.

So if you want a lot of your desktop to be Desktop service oriented then
that's great. Put on your pointy hat, grow a beard, drink Jolt Cola and
come join the fun.

> This is proper engineering and gives a very good and powerful base.

Sure, great. Come join the fun!

[CUT]


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
http://codeminded.be