Re: [java-gnome-hackers] a possible merge strategy

[Colin W. <wa...@ve...>]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 4:57 AM, Stefan Prelle <st...@pr...> wrote:
>
> What is different is our philosophy. We decided for a reason not to use
> the generated API as a public API, since often the usage of the
> generated APIs is not what a normal Java programmer usually would do.

I understand java-gnome's target audience is "Java programmer".  My
target audience is platform hackers and community developers who are
already familiar with the C API, who want a sane language and might be
willing to *learn* Java.  Personally I think java-gnome is in a tough
situation on this front because if what you need is "free
crossplatform GUI toolkit", SWT and Qt-Jambi have always been around,
and Swing is now Free.  On the other hand, SWT and Swing don't offer
GStreamer, WebKit, Clutter.

> So we have this handcrafted public API to smoothen the edges of
> underlying APIs and reduce the learning curve for developers coming from
> the Java world.

I understand the goal - note the tradeoff is this *increases* the
learning curve for people coming from the GNOME community who already
know the C APIs, because you're left guessing how things work.

> Personally I would like to keep the hand written API, because I see it
> as a big plus.

Sure, until you want to use WebKit, Clutter, or GStreamer.

> Another possibility would be to use JGIR to feed our code generator and
> replace our .def files. By that we would get a much better non-public
> binding to write the public binding for.

With a relatively small amount of work I could make the JGIR code
generator optionally output transformed class names, so instead of
org.gnome.gir.dynamic.Gtk.AboutDialog, it would output
org.gnome.gir.GtkAboutDialog.

> This might go together with improvements on our GObject code, but that
> must be discussed with people more familiar with the ugly binding
> details than me.

Yes, I would like to discuss that.

> JGIR is definetly an interesting aproach and it would be nice to have
> you onboard helping us with our code generation. You seem to have put a
> lot of effort on this, so it would be a shame if we could not both
> benefit from this. But I would not go so far to rely on automated
> generated public APIs using JGIR.

You may not - but there are a lot of people who would.  Note both
pygtk and Mono rely on public (after review) autogeneration - and
there are *way* more pygtk and Mono apps shipped by vendors than
java-gnome.