"This presents a high-level overview of the different pieces of the GNOME Platform: libraries to write user interfaces, to integrate with the desktop, to do inter-process communication, the virtual file system, accessibility, multimedia. You should read this to know what tools you can use to perform different things in your GNOME applications."
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
While CORBA might not have been the best choice, a component system is a requirement for an application framework, because it reduces bloat by enabling sharing of large parts of functionality.
True, but then again, what are the alternatives? There is SOAP, but like what a GNOME coder said to me, it would be the equivilant of killing a flea with an atom bomb.
There is KDE's KParts idea, but I'm not too sure whether that would fit into the whole GNOME paradigm.
Then there is always the avenue of 'develop something new' which brings a whole new ball of worries along with it - its the equivilant of a person saying, 'lets re-write the application from scratch!' after a security bug is found.
From what I understand DBus is losely based on KDE's system, but abstracted and more flexible; its sad, however, that they haven't started designing things on GNOME 3.0 yet - outlining radical changes now so that proof of concept models and the like can be developed to show the fesibility of a particular idea.
Member since:
2005-07-07
For a desktop?
For the associated application development framework.
Bonobo and CORBA
While CORBA might not have been the best choice, a component system is a requirement for an application framework, because it reduces bloat by enabling sharing of large parts of functionality.
XML and Web Services
A lot of services applications or users will want to interact with are now using XML and are implemented as webservices. Google Maps, Wikipedia integration, etc
Definitely something a good application framework should offer instead of forcing every application to decide on their own and end up with multiple libraries in memory that do the same thing
SOAP
Only point from your list that might not be necessary
XML Processing and Transforming XML with XSLT
See XML and Webservices. Availability of XML processing functionality is a must for up-to-date application frameworks, think OpenDocument support, SyncML, etc