[interfacekit] Fwd: Re: Interface Kit/app_server

Hey, Mike!

I've heard some similar ideas with regards to porting Qt, and while both 

ideas have a great deal of merit (for the very reasons you list), the 
devil is in the details, as they say. ;)  It's my fear that the combined 

effort necessary to hammer either API into working shape with regards to 

BeOS's multithreading model and write a BeAPI compatibility layer would 
equal or (more likely) exceed that of a "from scratch" implementation.  
There is a team of people who have been laboring for well over a year to 

port GTK+ to BeOS -- with some success, I might add -- but even their 
efforts fall short of accomplishing what you suggest here.  Given the 
need to move as quickly as possible in order to bolster the developer 
and user communities' confidence, I would really hate to go down that 
path only to discover that it a) isn't going to work, b) requires 
immense amounts of work or c) is a non-optimal solution for some other 
reason.  The main issue, as I see it, is that GTK+ is designed for an 
environment where the windowing system is synchronous within a given 
application, and adapting this to the BeOS "every window has its own 
thread" model will, in all likelihood, be very difficult.

None of this is to say, however, that I'm completely closed to the idea. 

 If you, or someone else, can flesh out how to work around those 
devilish details in a reasonable way, I'd be very interested, as I'm 
sure the rest of the team would be.  We'll take whatever real shortcuts 
we can! ;)  Even if it turns out to not be feasible, I'm interested in 
the possibility of trying to structure the app_server in such a way that 

APIs designed for synchronous, single-thread environments (such as GTK+ 
and Qt) could be easily supported, thereby making it much easier to port 

the APIs in the first place.  Then we could have our cake and eat it, 
too! =)

Having said all that, the team can still use help; are you interested?  
What sort of skill set do you have?

Thanks!

e

>Hello,
>
>I had an idea about the reimplementation of the Interface Kit , but I 
don't know if it is possible, so I thought I would send it you and see 
>what you thought, since you are the lead of the Interface Kit.
>
>My idea is to implement the app_server using GTK+/DirectFB.  Expose 
>GTK+ as an available API, then build the Interface/App Kit on top of 
>this library.  This gives the following advantages:
>    1) A large portion of the work is already done 
>    2) Developer now have the option of 2 languages to build 
>applications and bringing other languages to BeOS becomes easier 
because 
>they can interface the c library instead of the c++ library wrapped in 
a 
>c library.
>    3) A large collection of GTK+ apps become easier to port.
>    4) You have a large body of developers/support/testers already in 
>place working on GTK+ for Gnome.
>
>I know that this is a broad description and there are lots of details 
>missing, but I think this is a viable option.
>
>Let me know what you think,
>Mike

Data is not information, and information is not knowledge: knowledge is 
not understanding, and understanding is not wisdom.
        - Philip Adams

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