[ruby-talk:11443] Re: trial balloon: Ruby desktop?

"W. Kent Starr" wrote:
> Oviously, from other responses, people _are_ interested.  I am curious,
> though, re your dissatisfaction with KDE and GNOME; is this the result of the
> 'politics', technical reasons, or aesthetics? The answer(s), of course,
> somewhat define the problemspace.

Mostly technical reasons. First, I think that writing solid applications
in C or C++ isn't easy, and I think that stifles rapid development of
new applications and muddies the design of existing applications.
Second, I think we should focus on a framework of reusable components:
if someone writes a component that handles IMAP, it should be usable
anywhere (KDE has had IMAP code for some time, but none of the email
clients use it, because their component architecture is bad). There are
other reasons, and perhaps others can help flesh them out.

> You're not crazy. Of course, one has to determine what the concept of
> 'desktop' is to be? One thought is to develop XPCOM bindings for Ruby and
> then have a 'desktop' that is in reality a giant browser (but without the
> limitations or bloat of a 'real' browser unless that kind of functionality is
> desired) pulling applications and data from decentralized servers all over
> the world. Perhaps some kind of menage a troi involving Ruby, Mozilla and
> FreeNet?

Oh God, not Mozilla. :) But that idea sounds interesting. We should
probably talk about the different models: application-centered,
document-centered, are there others?

Jon
-- 
_______________________________________________________________________
  Jonathan Aseltine     [e-mail]     MAS, Umass, Amherst