From kragen@dnaco.net Mon Jul 20 15:50:11 1998 Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1998 15:50:10 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen Reply-To: Kragen To: dave@scripting.com Subject: Universal scripting on Linux Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 637 Status: O X-Status: Brief summary: there will be a standard language-independent scripting API for Linux later this year. (Some of it is available now.) Well, as you know, the situation isn't terribly simple. There are lots of people, and none of the ones who are interested in scripting are powerful enough to force a single scripting API, the way Microsoft and Apple did. There are three "desktop" projects for Linux, one of which is likely to have a lot of influence in the near future. The oldest one is CDE, the Common Desktop Environment developed by IBM five years or so ago. Most commercial Unix vendors have adopted CDE as their standard. I suspect that CDE will never be adopted on Linux for several reasons: - It's clunky, ugly, and not technically excellent. Most of the influential Linux people are prejudiced against these things. - It's proprietary; Linux vendors and Linux users tend to be prejudiced against proprietary software, since much of the cost benefit associated with Linux has to do with being able to freely duplicate configured machines, freely fix problems, and freely seek tech support. - It's expensive. If it were gratis, it might conceivably overcome the previous two objections, but it's not. The next-oldest one is KDE, originally the Kool Desktop Environment -- more recently the K Desktop Environment. Some folks at Troll Tech decided to make Linux the perfect platform for novice users, building on their proprietary cross-platform GUI toolkit, Qt (pronounced "cute".), and so they started KDE. More info at www.kde.org. KDE has a lot of followers, but the proprietariness of the underlying toolkit is a problem for a lot of people. KDE is pretty stable now, though, and is definitely the first choice of desktop for lots of people for the time being. Enter GNOME, the GNU Object Model Environment. The implementation of the GIMP, a PhotoShop competitor, included a GUI toolkit comparable to Qt, known as GTK+. Some people who didn't like Qt's proprietariness started building a KDE competitor on top of GTK+. The GNOME project has attracted the support of many of the most prestigious people in the Linux community. The GIMP developers are (not surprisingly) behind it all the way; the Debian folks made a large monetary donation toward its further development; and now Red Hat has set up a lab (www.labs.redhat.com) to develop it. For this lab, Red Hat hired Alan Cox, the current benevolent dictator for the "Stable" Linux 2.0 kernel series (Linus is spending all his time on the "development" 2.1 series), Carsten Haitzler, the primary developer of Enlightenment, and Marc Ewing, one of the founders of Red Hat. These are extremely technically competent people. Lots of the best and brightest Linux people are working on the GNOME project. And because they aren't bound by the proprietary Qt license KDE is, they can develop much faster. I expect them to surpass KDE in functionality, stability, and users by the end of the year. They've decided that all GNOME applications should export functionality via CORBA. Originally, they were using an ORB called Mico, but they've decided they're going to have to write their own ORB to get acceptable performance. Of course, this means all GNOME apps will be remotely scriptable. You get your wish -- a standard, language-independent scripting mechanism for Linux. Oh, and it works over TCP/IP, too. A paper on GNOME by Miguel de Icaza (who was one of the folks who led the Linux-on-SPARC porting effort a few years ago) was presented at Linux Expo. It's at . Hope this helps. Kragen