Hi Tristan, The MVC pattern has been around a long time but your suggestion of moving UI into its own process is quite intriguing. The marshalling of data, and the need for a really tight response to user actions, are going to be pain points I think. Still worth some real investigation. Are you looking into this further?
cheers, David Tristan Buckmaster wrote: > hello everyone, > > With the recent shakeup to the computing ecosystem with the addition of > netbooks, ipods, android, gmail, facebook, etc.; I was wondering what place > gnome will have in the future. I was concerned with the platform > inflexibility of programs such as Evolution, which is only really suitable > to be run on a desktop or laptop; Gmail on the other hand works great on > desktops, laptops, android phones, netbooks etc. I can also run Gmail from > pretty much any ones computer, whether it be Linux, Windows or Mac OS. > > Now what I am advocating is not a complete rewrite of Gnome to run on the > web; I believe that this is implausible for the moment. What I would like > to see is a concerted effort to provide greater separation between the UI > and the core of Gnome programs, so the eventually there is a complete > separation, ie. the UIs runs on a completely separate processes than the > cores and so it would be possible to separate UIs and cores into completely > separate development projects. > > Such separation would have a multitude of benefits. Most programs already > try to separate UI code, from core code, as this is simply a good > programming practice, so this would just be taking that to the next step. > With the UI being a separate project, it would then be easy to fork this > project and create a plethora of UIs, ones that work well on netbooks, ones > for the web, even windows, mac osx and KDE ones (please don't shoot me, or > start some flame war about using qt). Such a development effort I think > will help future proof Gnome and prevent Gnome become a collection of > monolithic applications that only run properly on outdated platforms. In > the future I don't want to worry about what computer I am using, I just want > to access my mail, music, documents, ect. in a consistent way no matter > where the files are actually stored or where the core computations are > actually done. The cloud computing dream could become within reach. It > would also open Gnome up to a whole new set of potential open source > developers; no longer will a developer have to understand the underlying > architecture of an application to contribute to it. Programmers would be > free to experiment will all sorts of new UIs, taking advantage of new > technologies such as 'multi-touch', accelerometers, eye-tracking, > speech-recognition, etc. New opportunities would exist for writing programs > accessible for the deaf, or blind. Also, I am sure Intel and AMD won't mind > a few more processes for there future zillion core CPUs to play with. > > Anyway that is just my armchair observer 2-cents, feel free to ignore me :-) > > Tristan > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > desktop-devel-list mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
