[Java-gnome-developer] Architecture disucssion on -hackers

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

Hey there developers!

As anyone who has used java-gnome knows, there are a number of areas
where we're not as strong as we could be.

That's no crime - the bindings *are* usable - and certainly no knock on
the successive teams of people who have been hacking on the GTK and
GNOME bindings since 1998. However, we do have a number of areas we need
to clean up. There are non-trivial naming inconsistencies present in the
mapping. There are  glaring coverage omissions. Certain common elements
are implemented inefficiently. This is all in no small part due to the
fact that java-gnome has tracked GTK+ since the earliest days, and so
you see evidence of the evolution of the Glib and GTK APIs instead of
the nice clean interfaces you see today. And of course there was the
java-gnome team's efforts to stay backwards compatible with the code
that was already out there.

Time to go to the next level.

We're beginning a series of discussions on the java-gnome-hackers
mailing list and on #java-gnome about these issues. If you want to
contribute to shaping the outcome, please do join the list. A fair bit
of conceptual work has been done in the past and so I'll be pointing out
historical discussions that will be of interest. Several of us have also
done a fair bit of the API redesign work, and excitement is creeping up.

One thing that is really obvious, however, is that there is no way that
we'll be able to preserve the existing API - indeed, fixing the
inconsistencies is half the point of the effort. This message therefore
also serves as the first formal advertisement of a forthcoming major API
break. That's never easy for developers, but we're pretty sure that the
end result on the other side will be more complete, more stable, and
better performing.

There will therefore likely be no java-gnome 2.18. The next version
after the java-gnome 2.16.z release set will probably be called 4.0 to
clearly signal the API change. Marginal improvements will continue to be
accepted on the 2.y line as long as anyone wants to contribute them.

AfC
Sydney

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Managing Director
Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd

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