|
From: Wido D. <wid...@gm...> - 2005-04-01 14:17:50
|
The Luma Project Team is pleased to announce that the future development and growth of user base has been secured. As some of you might know, I'm in my final exams and will have to work for a company after that. This will ultimately result in a massive slowdown of development since I'm the only person with knowlege about the codebase. And there aren't many developers out there with knowlege about Python, Qt and LDAP. Luckily this scenario won't happen. A well known three-letter company from the IT industry has hired Bjorn Ove Grotan (who has done work on the backend side) and me to work on Luma fulltime. The contract is for the next three years. I can't give you name of the company yet, since this deal involves some stuff developed by them inhouse. The technology used in Luma will be part of the software stack used in their enterprise desktop. A full announcement about their work will be made in about 6 months. But I can promise you that this stuff will be fully open sourced, most likely the LGPL because of adoption issues by the community. The good thing is that there will be no changes or restrictions for the current users. I'll explain what we're up to. Our new employer has created a cross-desktop development platform based on Java. It enables applications the same look&feel and integration for Swing/Java, Gnome and KDE. Support for Winforms on the .Net-platform is planned for the future. The GUI files from Qt Designer and Glade can be reused, so code will work out of the box. The only catch is that you can't load the UI files from within the code. Instead the Java code will be autogenerated. This is exactly the same stuff we're using for Luma. The UI files are compiled with pyuic to Python code. The other method to avoid a rewrite of large parts of Luma is the use of Jython. This enables the use of Python code on the Java platform. It's a stable technology and is even used by Google internally. This is the stuff that enables Luma to run on their platform and involves ZERO CHANGES to the current codebase. The stuff Gagatan and me are doing is about integration and giving other developers of desktop applications the possibility to add rich LDAP support. One of the features we're working on now is FULL Active Diretory support. We have the technical documentation at hand to create the same (and even better) tools for administrators and their Windows server. Additionally Samba will be supported. All this stuff is part of the companies efforts to ease migration of users and servers from Windows to Unix/Linux. We're interested in your feedback. Also we want to hear from you what can be further improved in Luma. This is the time to raise your voice. The Luma Project Team P.S.: I said it. World domination is near :) -- Wido Depping ICQ: 51303067 AIM: wido3379 Jabber: wi...@ja... Blog: http://widoww.blogspot.com |