John Margaglione wrote:
> It does seem as though Glade is slowing down. I think Glade is
> incredibly important to Gnome's future, as a good development tool can
> attract hordes of developers. Right now Glade is usable only for
> small-ish projects, for the most part because of the source code output
> mechanisms. Once that is fixed, however, Glade will need constant
> updates to support the latest Gnome technologies. Microsoft has kept
> developers (relatively) happy by providing support for the latest
> technologies in its VB/VC products. If it weren't for the tool support,
> nobody would have used COM/OLE (ever written low-level IUnknown
> implementations? Not fun).
For large projects (like Evolution which I work on) people seem to prefer
to use libglade (but just for dialogs). You can keep each dialog in a
separate XML file so it scales pretty well.
> We do need to have a consensus about where Glade needs to go in the
> future. Here are just a handful of questions:
>
> 1. Should it remain a UI builder, or should it be integrated with
> editors/project managers to create a complete IDE? If so, what should
> the interfaces to these other tools be?
I think we've agreed on an integrated IDE via Corba & Bonobo.
Of course this won't be available in the GTK+ version, but we can't do
everything.
> 2. Should Glade provide a customization API so that developers can add
> their own designers for their Gtk/Gnome/Bonobo widgets?
We can try to use the GtkArg/GParam stuff in GTK+/GLib, and also the
BonoboPropertyBag stuff which we partially support now.
An extra customization API may be useful. I'm not sure if Bonobo has that.
> 3. Should the XML format be overhauled? (As a code generation author, I
> can tell you first hand that it needs work).
Maybe, once we know exactly what the final format should be.
(But there are many other things to do and this is a religious issue, so
forget you even mentioned it!)
> 4. Should glade be a tool for entry-level programmers, exposing only the
> most basic features of Gtk/Gnome, or should it be a power-user tool,
> allowing endless customizability and flexibility?
It should be the best that we can make it, with our limited time.
> Could we get a general status report from the developers? I know
> someone is working on GtkExtra support. If you are working on Glade,
> how about posting what you are working on?
I'm mainly only doing bug fixes at present. Michael Meeks occasionally works
on the Bonobo stuff. Federico said he may try to add Undo support, though he
also has tons of other things to do.
I don't know of anyone else doing any development.
Glade doesn't seem to attract many developers. I'm not sure why.
Damon
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