Re: [Java-gnome-developer] 3 questions

[Andrew C. <an...@op...>]

On Fri, 2010-09-10 at 02:08 +0400, Grigory Ptashko wrote:
> I am a java developer and a linux user (currently it is ubuntu 10.04
> LTS).

Nice. There's a PPA for people who want the latest released version of
java-gnome, and there are lucid packages there.

> awareness about whether the system is going to be shutdown or
> hibernated or suspended etc

Tricky. There doesn't seem to be a desktop wide means of providing such
notifications, though some people talk to NetworkManager to find out.
> 
> So my questions are:
>      1. Can I at all write a gnome panel applet with java-gnome? 

Short answer: no.

Medium answer: not yet.

Long answer: more of an engineering discussion, but if you look at this
message on java-gnome-hackers, you might get an idea of some of the
considerations.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.bindings.java.devel/1135

Since I wrote that, someone has contributed code to gnome-panel to make
it no longer rely on Bonobo and use DBus instead, but my comment about
IPC still being IPC whether it's over CORBA or DBus remains.

And in any case, the fundamental machinery necessary to make an applet
work remains convoluted and intricate, so it's a hard problem.

That said,

PanelApplet just descends from GtkContainer [ie org.gnome.panel.Applet
would extend org.gnome.gtk.Container] so at a certain level all we need
to do is that. It's more complicated because the thing to initialize an
applet is a C MACRO, but we could do that in an Override.

Once the next release of gnome-panel is out, then maybe we can look at
this together...

AfC
Sydney


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