Re: Gnome Programming & App Development Theory & Practice

On Sat, 17 Apr 2004 14:54:34 -0500
[email protected] (Linas Vepstas) wrote:

> After the long round of discussions about application development,
> and what database interfaces one should use, and what programming
> languages one should use, and etc. etc.  and, more narrowly, my
> part in adding to the confusion,  I've revamped the theory and
> movitation sections of the two projects I am trying to work on.
> 
> There's no easy way to summarize the conclusions, other than to 
> say that one reason that PHP/Java/etc. web applications are booming
> is that it is still very hard to write multi-user distributed
> Desktop Applications (Gnome or KDE or Microsoft, for that matter).
> 
> My little contributions to making desktop app developments easier,
> as well as sideways response to Pennington's 'Java, Mono, C++'
> article, are now expounded and expanded on at:
> 
> http://qof.sourceforge.net/why-qof.html
> 
> http://dwi.sourceforge.net/    

Hi,

I don't know if this will help any, but the GNU Enterprise project
(www.gnue.org) seem to have achieved something on similar lines to what
you are describing. I don't think that they conciously decided to come
up with a declaratory language for form descriptions, but nevertheless
seem to have devised one.

However, it seems to require a fair amount of procedural code to do
anything non-trivial.

I do agree with your main contention. SQL is probably the best evidence
for it. The SQL language allowed RDBMS developers to innovate greatly
while maintaining a large degree of backward compatibility.

I have been thinking on similar lines, but you've articulated it much
better than I could ever have.

-- b


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