Herostratus’ legacywords from a lazy coder

The last two years the GUADEC has been pushing the geographical limits of Europe: in 2008 in Istambul, more near to Asia, and now, in 2009, in Canarias, more near to Africa. And that’s OK, I like it actually, is better than repeating the old hosts of the conference.

Comparing my impressions with that two last GUADECs, I found something interesting: In Istambul the new ideas were boiling the environment, bold proposals: the seminal concepts for Gnome Shell, Zeitgeist, Gnome 3.0, and so on. And now, in Gran Canaria, the spirit was an evaluation the development of those ideas, a revision of where the project is and what’s missing to achieve the goals.

In Istambul, the hackers takeoff. In Gran Canaria, the hackers landed.

Nokia stepped back from GTK+ in their products and announced their official support to its recently acquired Qt framework. And that announcement staggered the gnome mobile gang, forcing to rethink their objectives.

The online desktop died and from its rotten corpse a new flower appeared: Gnome Shell: The desktop is a canvas driven by javascript applets, just like the Web 2.0. Moblin also adopted that idea, and many other are going in that path.

The Federico’s crazy idea about a chronological desktop evolved into Zeitgeist, which is taking over as the Tracker user interface for Gnome.

The furor unleashed in Istambul with the announce of the efforts for Gtk+-3.0 had been diminished in this time. Nevertheless, Garnacho showed in the GUADEC-ES some of his unfinished branches, some of them quite amazing, but unmerged into mainstream yet.

Almost of the attention was hogged by Clutter, and the Moblin guys are using this to push the rest of their framework. I guess that everybody is waiting a miraculous merge among Gtk+ and Clutter, but that’s really hard to happen.

Vincent is still pushing for Gnome 3.0. And I really wish for that to happen. And Gnome 3 means GnomeShell, Zeitgeist, and possible Gtk+ 3.0 and GStreamer 1.0. Those new versions doesn’t mean necessary new features, but more clean ups in the code.

What excited me the most was the discussion towards GStreamer 1.0. There’s plenty of work to do. Hopefully I’d find a spot to collaborate on it.

Also I went the ConMan talk and a couple about WebKit, DBus, and a couple more.

Last week I attended the Guadec 2008 in Turkey. It was my second Guadec. The first one was in Sevilla in 2002, when I was backpacking Europe. The big difference between my previous and this last guadec is that now I have a better understanding of the state of the art, so I could appreciate more the talks and proposals done, which I will try to summarize in this post.

The Gnome community faces new and not so new challenges. The framework is trying to push its limits to new frontiers besides renovate its own core.

First there is the discussion about the strategy for Gtk+. Imendio is pushing for a ABI breakage in order to polish the API, sealing the private data in the components, among other things. Nevertheless, Miguel, being the voice of several ISV, is disagree with proposed path.

In the Gtk+ road map, a great discussion has been raised about the new canvas. Seems that the favorite contender is Clutter, pushed by OpenedHand.

In other front, Mark Shuttleworth came up with the idea to integrate QT in Gnome, replacing Gtk+ in the long term.

Alp Toker presented the advances in WebKit development, and in my perception, a lot of gnomies are webkit enthusiast, because have a tighter integration with the Gtk+ widgets and better performance than Firefox currently (which is always temporal). So I expect more applications using webkit rather than embedded Mozilla.

Following the web area, there’s a big effort, basically from the RedHat guys for the online desktop, integrating the desktop with different and heterogeneous web feeds. I think this is a must for the next desktop environment. More and more applications are web integrated, and give a framework to do this and mix all that information smartly is a huge need.

All the multimedia stack is healthy managed by the guys at Collabora and Fluendo. There’s an important effort in data communication (Telepathy and Farsight) using the GStreamer framework. Meanwhile another project, Ekiga, which doesn’t use GStreamer is steady and currently the better application for VoIP in Gnome.

Finally, Miguel is pushing for a HTTP desktop applications model, using Moonlight as front end machinery, and a custom HTTP server as gluing proxy for the back end systems applications. A bold idea with not too many supporters.

As colophon we must say in the mobile area are great efforts (Nokia as main bidder) to keep sync with the mainstream development and improve the performance in both fronts.

The ideas are in the table, the discussion is on going, and the code being committed. Where do you want to work in?