[rox-devel] Applet madness - or - Ow! my head hurts!

[Simon B. <sim...@pe...>]

I've been looking into applets and I don't like what I see.

Swallowing a window into the panel is as easy as an easy thing.  You 
basically make an X call that says "That windows position is relative to 
the panel and draw it just on top".

What's hard is finding the window in the first place. The panel can 
easily launch an "Applet" style application, but it then needs some 
collusion with the window manager to get the window that pops up.  The 
naive approach is to go looking for a function to convert pid to window, 
but you've no guarantee that what you're running locally is the thing 
generating the window.  eg:

# wmtime applet hosted on another machine
rsh foo wmtime

Different environments have different procedures for dealing with applets:

windowmaker/afterstep dock apps
enlightenment epplets
gnome panel applets
kde panel applets

are all different.
Doing anything universal with these just doesn't look feasible.  
Probably the best we can hope for is to make some externally reachable 
hook on the panel which can be used by the window manager which is used 
to obtain relative positioning info for an applet based on class so that 
the window manager can then reposition it.  No matter how you cut it, 
there's going to be issues.  I'm about to look into what a 
"gnome-compliant" window manager does to see if we can leverage that.