[Luma-announce] Future development directions

[Wido D. <wid...@gm...>]

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
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