On Novell and Toolkits

by Miguel de Icaza

Nat just posted the official Novell position on the toolkits

I just posted this to Slashdot:

As Nat has posted elsewhere, the Heise article is wrong.

My team and other teams within Novell continue to develop and use Gtk as their toolkit (recently open sourced Simias/iFolder for instance) and all of the Mono GUI development tools.

The only use of Qt that am aware of today is SUSE's recently open sourced YAST.

Btw, if you have been following my posts on my blog and on the desktop-devel-list, you will know that my feeling is that all of the existing toolkits today (Gtk, Qt, XUL and VCL) will become obsolete and we need to start looking at the next generation toolkit system.

Next Generation Toolkits

One of the interesting aspects of Avalon is that they built the widget set on the equivalent of Gnome's AA canvas. Canvas and Canvas items. They call them `FrameworkElements', but it is the same model: once you "paint" something, it stays there (link)

Nautilus had a branch that had some more advanced canvas items than the ones we ship in libgnomecanvas: Andy had written some canvas items that rendered tiny visualizations of a web page, so "web page" links would update live.

Novell LDAP for Mono

Sunil has an amazing tutorial on using the Novell.LDAP library for Mono. To find, go here and search for "DirectoryServices" on the Title. Sorry, the direct link fails.

Posted on 29 Mar 2004